Modern brewers use purees to capture the essence of fresh fruits in season.
Seasonal craft brews capture the soul of each season with the intense fresh fruit flavors of purees. For spring beers, brewers choose from juicy stone fruits like apricot, peaches, and plums. Summer brews boast cherries, strawberries, and watermelon. In the fall, apple ciders and pumpkin ales are inevitable. But what do brewers do with winter, a season that doesn’t exactly scream fresh fruit?
Winter is the season of the creative small craft brewer.
Winter may fall short in the fresh fruit category, but it’s an ideal time for brewers to experiment with novel fruited beers using purees. Consumers have certain flavor expectations during each growing season. They want pumpkin in October, not August. They want watermelon in July, not December. In winter, consumers want novelty. They want something to break up the monotony of cold, gray days.
If you’re a creative small craft brewer, winter beers provide an opportunity to do something original with familiar seasonal flavors. In fact, it’s something of a brewing tradition. Early farmers like Joos Franz Lindemans used their downtime during the winter months to experiment with brewing beers, fruit wines, and ciders. It was a way to keep farm workers occupied, to bring in extra income, and to make use of preserved fruits. We can credit winter experimentation with Lindeman’s Lambic Framboise, one of the most famous raspberry brews on the market today.
Raspberry is one of the most versatile flavors for fruited beers.
Few fruits are as versatile as the raspberry. They’re sweet with a subtle tartness that pairs well with spicy flavors like ginger and citrus. They’re delicate but able to hold their own when paired with rich flavors like chocolate and coffee. They’re light but they add depth to dark styles like stouts and porters. That makes raspberries a perfect addition to the winter beer ingredient list.
Christmas Ales and Winter Warmers
Christmas Ales may feature mulling spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and orange peel or bakery flavors like heavy cream and chocolate. Raspberry’s sweet, earthy profile compliments all of these old standard holiday flavors, but it also adds familiarity to more novel interpretations of the Christmas Ale. New York City’s Evil Twin Brewing’s All I Want For Christmas Sour Ale marries raspberry and mango with decadent white chocolate for a completely original take on the traditional style.
Stouts, Porters and other Dark Beers
Winter beers are dark and filling. They incorporate bitter flavors like roasted coffee and dark chocolate. Ripe raspberry flavor freshens up these heavier beers, adding a hint of sweetness to the bitterest brews. Three Heads Brewing’s Chocolate-Raspberry Imperial Stout pairs the flavor of fresh raspberries with bold chocolate for a burly stout with a sweet side.
Customize your creative winter brew with Purée Areté raspberry puree.
Creative American brewers achieve new flavor heights with Purée Areté fruit purees crafted by Austrian chef Wolfgang Brandl. When you customize your fruited winter beers with our puree, you’re getting nothing but pure fruit flavor. Our award-winning fruit purees infuse winter brews with real fruit flavor. Our rigorous standards ensure that each batch is consistent. Each flavor is available in a 5-gallon bag-in-box or 55-gallon drums.
