So I'm not looking to brew this till closer to the summer but for a while I've thought about trying to clone a Saranac Strawberry Tart. It's one of my favorite seasonal offerings from my favorite NY brewery and it happens to be the only beer that my wife who isn't a beer drinker really happens to like. I figure if I time it right I can have it ready for our 10th anniversary in August. I have the recipe here:
https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/1116976/saranac-strawberry-tart-clone-attempt
I realize the difficulty in accurately cloning a commerical beer so I should say what I'm really looking for is an easy drinking wheat beer with a good balance of sweet and sour and good strawberry flavor. It'll be my first time doing a kettle sour and also my first time adding fruit. I was thinking about adding thawed and sliced/smashed strawberries in secondary for the fruit flavor. Decided on US-05 because I want a relatively clean finish. I choose Saaz for the hops because I want roughly 12 IBUs of bitterness with either no or very delicate hop flavor and I didn't want to buy 1 oz of a higher AA hop and only use .25oz. Ofcourse it occurs to me now, but didn't at 1 AM when I was in bed working on this, that I could just add a higher AA hop at 30 minutes instead. So I'm open to suggestions on that.
My only other concern is carrying a kettle with around 7 gallons of wort to the basement to chill and then to sour and then having to carry it back upstairs to boil again only to carry it back down to chill and pitch. So I might consider scaling it down to 3-4 gallons instead of my usual 5. I did up my target volume for the fermenter though from 5 to 5.5 because I'm assuming I might lose some beer to the strawberries either though absorption or because of debris/trub at the bottom of secondary. Either way I got some time to figure that part out. Curious what you all think?
https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/1116976/saranac-strawberry-tart-clone-attempt
I realize the difficulty in accurately cloning a commerical beer so I should say what I'm really looking for is an easy drinking wheat beer with a good balance of sweet and sour and good strawberry flavor. It'll be my first time doing a kettle sour and also my first time adding fruit. I was thinking about adding thawed and sliced/smashed strawberries in secondary for the fruit flavor. Decided on US-05 because I want a relatively clean finish. I choose Saaz for the hops because I want roughly 12 IBUs of bitterness with either no or very delicate hop flavor and I didn't want to buy 1 oz of a higher AA hop and only use .25oz. Ofcourse it occurs to me now, but didn't at 1 AM when I was in bed working on this, that I could just add a higher AA hop at 30 minutes instead. So I'm open to suggestions on that.
My only other concern is carrying a kettle with around 7 gallons of wort to the basement to chill and then to sour and then having to carry it back upstairs to boil again only to carry it back down to chill and pitch. So I might consider scaling it down to 3-4 gallons instead of my usual 5. I did up my target volume for the fermenter though from 5 to 5.5 because I'm assuming I might lose some beer to the strawberries either though absorption or because of debris/trub at the bottom of secondary. Either way I got some time to figure that part out. Curious what you all think?