Can fruit be left in secondary too long?

Question

I just put 5 pounds of blackberries in secondary fermenter with 5 of the 10 gallons of a Belgian wit. I was going to bottle it all one week from now, assuming fermentation has died down.

Are there any drawbacks to leaving the fruit in for a week? What about 2 weeks? I brewed again this weekend and might just wait and bottle it all together. Should I rack the beer off e blackberries at some point in the meantime?

Result:

This doesn't show the color as well as I'd like. While you're pouring it, it's almost pink-ish, which is when it looks its most unnatural. In the glass it looks closer to a very reddish brown.

Answer 1

I think it's possible to leave the fruit in there for too long, but I don't think a couple of weeks or even a month will hurt. As a homebrewer and home winemaker, I have two ways to look at this issue...

Technically, when you ferment fruit you are making wine. When you add fruit to your secondary, one could argue that you're adding a bit of wine to your beer, because the beer yeast will ferment the fruit. In that sense, a beer with real fruit added to the secondary is a beer/wine blend.

Now, from the beer perspective, I've seen plenty of fruit lambic recipes that say to add the fruit to the secondary and leave it there for half a year or longer. I've never tried this, but lots of people do it. Lambic may be a bad example, though, because the sourness might mask any possible detriments caused by leaving the fruit in too long.

From the winemaking perspective, when you make red wine you ferment a big vat of crushed fruit (called must). When it's at or very near to it's terminal gravity (at or below 1.000), you press the must to free the wine from the solids. Most of the solids remain in the press to be discarded (this is called pomace). However, a good bit of smaller-particle gunk makes it through pressing and into whatever vessel you collect your wine in. After a day or two, this gunk precipitates out and settles on the bottom, along with a good deal of dead yeast. This layer of sediment is called the gross lees. It's mostly grape pulp. If you do not rack your wine off the gross lees after a few days, you could end up with a serious sulphur problem in your wine.

The differences I can see between what winemakers do and what brewers do when adding fruit to a secondary are

1. The fruit is added to the secondary whole and unfermented, whereas gross lees are already fermented. Red wine usually takes about a week to ferment, give or take a week. Consider your racking of beer onto the fruit to be akin to the start of wine fermentation.
2. When you rack onto the fruit in the secondary, you're pretty much only getting active, viable yeast that hasn't yet gone dormant, whereas the gross less in wine contain a bunch of dead & dormant yeast. The autolysis risk is lower when doing what brewers do versus what winemakers do.
3. Beer yeast is less likely to give off H2S if left in contact with spent fruit and dead or dormant comrades, while wine yeast is more finicky about this.

In the end, I think if you leave your beer on the fruit for many months, you run the risk of some yucky odors & flavors in your beer, but a few weeks or even a month or two won't hurt.

Answer 2

I left the blueberries in my melomel for a month. Though it was at around 10% alcohol when I put them in there, but you do want them in long enough to extract as much of the flavors as you can.