You can of course create your own custom fruit, juice and honey entries. You can choose to estimate the color of the item itself or simply estimate the color of the beer without the fruit first and then mentally estimate how much it might change with a fruit addition. The color of many items is set to zero by default simply because fruit and juice comes in a wide variety of colors and many of these colors are not the typical brown/blonde variants we see from beer malt. The other item to consider modifying when working with fruit or juice is the color. I typically will add fruit most often as part of the primary fermentation, though some brewers prefer to add it in the secondary to maximize fruit aroma. While editing the fruit ingredient, you can also specify the use. For honey, most honey has a brix reading of around 82% sugar which corresponds to a specific gravity of 1.440. Both the Sugar Content in Brix/plato and the Specific Gravity readings can be found under the Yield/Sugar Content heading for any fermentable where you have the type set to fruit. Alternately you can enter the specific gravity measured instead. If your hydrometer does not have a Brix scale you can use the Plato scale as the degrees Plato and Brix match to within a tiny fraction of 1%. If your hydrometer has a Brix scale you can use the Brix reading directly in BeerSmith by double clicking on the juice or fruit ingredient and entering the Brix value you measured with the hydrometer. Simply pour out a small sample of the fruit juice (or crush a bit of fruit into a puree) and then use the hydrometer to measure the gravity.

This is easy to do if you have a hydrometer available. While the preloaded ingredients are a good place to start, you often will need to adjust the sugar content of the specific juice of fruit you are working with. Both of these can be found from Ingredients->Fermentables view. A number of these are included with the default BeerSmith 3 (or higher) programs, and you can access additional fruit, honey, cider and wine ingredients from the Add-on button on the desktop or the “Manage Preloaded” button on the new web version of BeerSmith. Starting with BeerSmith 3 and BeerSmith Web, the program now natively supports honey, juice and fruits as fermentable types. I often bag purees and wine bases as well though some purees are thin enough to escape the bag.

I also prefer to use a grain bag with the fruit to make it easier to separate the fruit. For whole fruit I will often wash and freeze the fruit first which helps open up the cellular structure, and then thaw and crush or dice it before adding to the fermenter. Whole fruit and purees are more difficult to work with because it can be difficult to separate the fruit from the beverage when fermentation is complete. For juice, you want to pick brands that are pasteurized but have no preservatives as many preservatives can inhibit fermentation. Fruit juice and honey is generally the easiest to work with as they may be added directly to the primary or secondary fermenter. There are a number of practical considerations when working with fruit I won’t attempt to cover in detail here, but here are some tips. So adding fruit often lowers rather than increases the final gravity. Keep in mind that adding fruit to a beer will often lower your final gravity because fruit consists of highly fermentable sugars which will ferment to alcohol which has a final gravity below 1.000. Typically most fruits are added during primary or secondary fermentation. Fruit BasicsīeerSmith 3 supports the use of fruit juice, purees, honey and whole fruits natively when making beer, mead, wine and cider recipes. This week I cover some of the basic concepts of using fruit in BeerSmith for making beer, wine, cider or meads.

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