Thursday, September 2, 2010

Prickly Pear Syrup

I was inspired to look into more interesting ingredients for my beers and I came across this thread at HomebrewTalk.com (thread). They started talking about prickly pear and I was out on a ride that day and started seeing ripe fruit everywhere. Soon after, a nice fellow QUAFFer, Jeff, had some leftover fruit from his yard. His variety of prickly pears are huge, but that makes less work. I plan to try some of the smaller fruit to see how they differ. He told me his way of breaking down the fruit into a syrup, so having no prior experience that is what I went with.
I started with just over 3 lbs of fruit. I held the pears over the stove flame using tongs to burn off the nasty hairs/needles. Be very careful and it would be best to wear gloves in addition to using tongs. The hairs can be very annoying and difficult to remove. (I got a few in my hand while cleaning up). After burning the hairs I cut off the end that had most of the hairs. And then I sliced and diced the rest of the fruit and threw it in the pot.
With all 3 lbs in the pot I added about a cup of water just to insure the fruit wouldn't burn on the bottom. The fruit will produce a good amount of juice on their own. Per Jeff's recommendation I boiled the fruit for 2 hours. This helps to break down the mucus that is found in the fruit.
After boiling I poured it through a strainer and push out as much juice as possible. From there I poured the juice through the some muslin cloth. It happened to be about 16oz and fit nicely into an old water bottle.
I measured the pH to be about 4 and the gravity to be 1.050. The taste was interesting and a bit difficult to describe. It was similar to watermelon but with a little more sour twang. It did have a bit of a cooked flavor which I didn't enjoy too much, so I'm going try to get another variety and use it fresh. I haven't decided if I'm going to add this to a Berliner Weiss or to my sour pale.

3 comments:

  1. nice post. glad you brought these back to my attention as they are ripe and ready right about now! we have always had some optunias growing @ my parents place somehow in the middle of iowa. when i first started brewing, i did some meads and my original thoughts were to make a melomel with them. recently i've been thinking about doing porters with fruit so that might interesting or perhaps even using them in a sour brew...so many possibilities! berlinerweiss sounds like a great idea tho. It has been so long since i've had one, i need to re-taste them. a friend of mine recently purchased a prickly pear from a mexican grocery store here in town but it was not ripe and rather moldy. i dont know if i'd go to the effort of making a syrup tho, seems like i'd just cube em up small, freeze em, and add to the secondary. cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was just eyeing some of these in the store. I'm interested in how this turns out. I was also thinking of adding some to secondary in one of my meads just for kicks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I made the syrup for a couple reasons: 1. It helps to remove the mucus 2. More space efficient way to store it. I don't have a beer ready for this yet.
    I was out riding the other day and picked a few pounds of another variety, much smaller. I'm going to try to make a fresh syrup out of these. According to the guy I got them from he always boils for at least 2 hrs before he uses them in his mead. The mead was a hit at our homebrew meeting and the interesting part is that it loses almost all its color during aging. I think he uses around 2-2.5 lbs/gal.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...