I haven’t started doing a lot of brewing just yet but I’ve had some ideas for beers I want to attempt to make. One is a stout with some cherry. I’ve tasted a stout with cherry but I ended up not much liking the overall flavor it brought but i loved the aromas I got from the cherry they added. What would be the best process to get more aroma from a cherry added to a beer without getting a lot of flavor from the cherry?
I imagine it has something to do with when you add the fruit?
The only examles I've seen pull this off well are bottle aged beers. Where the flavors melow and meld with the malts but seem to keep the volatile aromas. (porters and stouts). Some fruits are better than others, stone fruits seem to do this best as whole fruit additions. While using just peels or zest from citrus often give more aroma than flavor in beer styles that are best fresh like IPAs.
How and when the fruit is added does play a big role. Boil additions impart more flavor than aroma. Secondary impart more aroma than flavor. There's many other times in between that will slide this scale on that spectrum.
Also fermenting under pressure helps keep those aromas from gassing out with the CO2.
Basically the same technics to enhance hop aromas and tame flavors can be applied to fruits.
