Brewing with Fruit: Wheat Beer and Beyond

Originally published in the May/June 2010 issue of Zymurgy magazine. Access all Zymurgy magazine issues through 2000 from your computer and mobile devices. Fruit beer has been brewed for hundreds of years in ancient pre-hopped brews and most famously as a flavoring of the tart, spontaneously fermented lambic beers of Belgium. Over time, fruit flavored fermented beverages may have been unique to geographical areas; however, in the last 20 years, they have become very popular in the craft brewing and homebrewing scenes in the U.S. Fruit beer emerged as a popular style in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s with blueberry, raspberry, cherry and apricot American-style wheats, and is now even more prevalent in the current brews of the day. Brewers are pushing toward exotic tropical fruits like passionfruit, mango, and pineapple with wheat beer,…

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