Cherries in the Snow- Batch 23

Cherries In The Snow

Thursday I brewed a batch of beer from the Papazian recipe “Cherries in the Snow.”  Having 10lbs of cherries laying around sure pays off!

The recipe called for 8.5lbs of light liquid malt extract, but instead of buying extra malt extract that I may not use I purchased a bulk 7lb liquid malt extract and 1lb of dry light malt extract.    I also purchased some hops to use with it, as I wanted the Tettnanger hops that it called for.

Cherries and Hops

Most of the process I spent crushing the cherries by hand, as they resisted my efforts to crush them with my potato masher.  So, with the assistance of my lovely wife, we crushed all the cherries.  I got the water boiling, added the extract and the bittering hops, and went back to crushing cherries.

Beer Wort Boiling

Once the boil was done I turned off the heat, added the cherries to the wort and the boiling hops and let it sit for 15 minutes to pasteurize the cherries.

Cherries and Hops in the wort

Once done, I dumped the whole lot into my fermentation bucket.  This morning, I aerated the wort and pitched the yeast.  Initial gravity turned out to be 1.066, which gives plenty of potential for a good alcohol content.   In 5 days I’ll transfer this to a secondary fermenter and let it finish.  A small sample taste assured me this will be a beer I’ll want to keep in stock.  Hoping my wife likes it, too!