Dosing beers with fruit syrup – Hombrew Blonde Ale Recipe and Review – All Grain / No Chill

April 24, 2024 Mike

In search of a beer that Jesse’s wife would like, she’ not much of a beer person, Jesse decided to try and brew a clone of a beer that she does indeed like, Dry Dock’s Apricot Blonde. It’s a great beer, and Dry Dock makes a whole line of blondes with fruit and other flavors.

Jesse brewed up the blonde, and then decided to dose it with some fruit syrup at serving time, so that he can change the fruit up, and add more or less depending on how much you like.

Jesse based his recipe on this one, on The Brew Hut’s website:
https://thebrewhut.com/resources-recipes/recipes/ale/apricot-blonde/

Mike had found this one as well awhile back on Archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090616110244/http://www.drydockbrewing.com:80/Recipes/ApricotBlondeAllGrainRecipe/tabid/837/Default.aspx

Jesse’s modified recipe is on the bottom of this page.

The next time he brews it, he’s going to reduce the hops a bit, he used some Magnum as the 60m addition, and thought it might have contributed some harsher bitterness. He was also adding the hops into the no chill container, which he’s since stopped doing.

Mike also brought some of his Peach kettle sour (with Philly Sour Yeast). Mike used a whole lot of peaches from a friend’s tree, and as it turns out, they’re freestone peaches, where the pit easily separates from the fruit. Great for eating, but maybe not so much for adding to a beer. Mike just wasn’t happy with the amount of peach flavor that they contributed.

He was going to dose the entire keg with some sugar free peach syrup, so as not to trigger another fermentation, but thinks he’s going to go with just dosing it at serving time as well.

Jesse had a little measured dropper, and he’s been using 6ml of each pipette, in this video we start with about a milliliter in the blonde, with great result. The regular and the sugar free syrup were both great.

With the peach kettle sour we started with 3ml, and it wasn’t enough. That’s the nice thing about adding the syrup at serving time, if it isn’t enough, you can add more.