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bottle conditioning fruited sours, priming with sugar, time windows

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  • bottle conditioning fruited sours, priming with sugar, time windows

    My questions involve refining our process for getting our fruited sours to have less sediment in the bottles.
    -We currently do not have a dedicated fruiting tank, so we fruit with whole fruit in barrels.
    -We can't really spare an extra tank to do a double transfer of our fruited sours, so we pretty much have to rack from barrels straight into our 10 barrel bottling tank, which contains a standpipe.
    -The beer is held for a couple days or so in the tank at 34 degrees, so the fruit is plenty settled out when we start.
    -When we recirculate the beer (out the bottom and up through the racking arm, pointed up), to mix in yeast and priming sugar, the settled out fruit particulate in the beer invariably re-suspends itself. In earlier bottlings, this has led to much more fruity sediment in the bottles than I would like to see.
    -Last run, we had good luck recirculating the sugar and yeast, then waiting 2 full hours before starting to bottle. We also had an in-line "torpedo" style mesh screen to catch large particulate. Some of the earlier bottles in the run have a little more sediment than I would like to see, but the later ones look really good.

    Now to my questions:
    I would be willing to give the beer even more time in the tank to settle out, after priming and before bottling. But I don't know how long the sugar will stay suspended evenly for. So...Is there a safe window here? And if an unfermented sugar is truly well mixed, will it stay mixed evenly in solution, or will it stratify? I'm not worried about fermentation starting at such a low temperature in such a small window, but the sugar stratifying could be a huge problem.

    Thanks for the help!
    Sean

  • #2
    I'd be voting for another tank to transfer cleared beer to once solids have settled out.

    Priming sugar etc into this new tank then transfer cleared beer to it after to ensure a good mix of your priming sugar.

    We bottle still with a 4x head wine filler with good success this way.

    - can you not justify a single skinned wine tank or similar (relatively cheap) for initial transfer and settling into?

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