Cranberry Ale

Classification: fruit beer, cranberry ale, extract

Source: Carlo Fusco (g1400023@nickel.laurentian.ca) Issue #991, 10/15/92

This is a variant of another recipe from Cat's Meow 2 (Ed: probably Tim Phillips' recipe on page 8--5). My cranberry ale came out to be light and tart. It has a nice flavor profile on its own. Add it only if you want to change the flavor of the end product to something sweeter, but try not to overpower the cranberry flavor too much.

Ingredients:

5 pounds, light malt extract
1 pound, sugar
1--1/4 ounce, Fuggles (Boiling 30 minutes)
3/4 ounce, Fuggles (Finishing 10 minutes)
Irish Moss
Gypsum
Munton & Fison Dry Ale yeast
3 pounds, pureed frozen Cranberries
Brown sugar for priming

Procedure:

I used a little under 3 pounds of frozen cranberries and pureed them right before adding to the wort right after turning off the heat. Their semi-frozen state brought the boil straight down. I had a strainer over the funnel hole and would let the wort drip through it. Then I would press it a bit with the ladling spoon and scoop it out into a bowl. This took a little while, and some of the wort was left behind in the saturated cranberries (I used hop bags and grain sacks so that there wasn't a lot of other stuff). But I topped it off with some tap water (gasp!) and got a nice two cases out of it.

Some of it was bound to get through though, and sometimes I find a cranberry seed in the bottom of my beer.