Advice bottling fruit berliner beers?

[luckydevil]

Hey all

Looking for some general advice... Brewed a berliner (from BCS) about 3 months ago that's tasting really nice sharp and lactic tangy and ready to bottle. I'm shooting for about 3.5 vol co2 in champagne bottles. I took 5 gallons out of a 10 gallon batch and split it into two fruit batches. One sat on peach puree and the other on fresh raspberries from my garden. The peach half is opaque, it just looks like peach juice after a few months on fruit, the raspberry half is also opaque and filled with chucks of fruit. Any good advice on clearing them a little and getting them off the fruit to bottle? The straight berliner is badass, but I had to mess around with it.

My plan is to rack them over to kegs, crash them cold to drop out whatever I can and bottle from there. Add a sugar solution to keg, gently stir it up, bottle it, set them in a warm place, drink. I guess I could rig something on the dip tube of a keg to filter out raspberry chucks. More interested in getting them to clear a bit. I didn't use in pectic enzyme, mostly cause I forgot when adding fruit. Can that be added at a later time? Any other fining techniques I should look at?

As a side note, berliner is freakin awesome! heard plenty of people saying it doesn't get sour enough, but this got pretty biting sour. the lactic fermentation looked like alien spew of some sort on top of the carboy so I guess my big lacto starter worked!

How cool is that!




Rich

[brewinhard]

I think you have the right idea with cold crashing it first. I probably wouldn't even rack it to a keg first either. Rather, I would cold crash it with the fruit right in it, then very carefully rack to a bottling bucket for packaging. But I am a tad lazy, so if you want to rack to a keg first then by all means go for it!

I brewed up a delicious apricot berliner weisse last year and it also soured nicely and the apricots gave it an extra acidic punch as well. I bet your raspberry BW will taste awesome. You might want to consider adding some fresh lacto to the bottling bucket to ensure proper carbonation as the original lacto might have dropped the pH too low for even themselves to condition the beer properly or in a timely manner. Fresh rehydrated dry yeast will do the same, but the lacto would be more traditional and keep it nice and sour.