Fruit Flavors


Fruit Flavors for Beer and Meads

Our 100% natural fruit flavors take all of the hassles, variables and uncertainties out of making fruit beers. No more pectins, added sugars or sanitation issues to worry about. Now you can even brew fruit beers out of season. Priced 10 lbs of raspberries lately? Our fruit flavors will even save you money!

If you think all fruit flavors are the same, think again! HopTech's fruit flavors are the same extracts used by commercial breweries and homebrewers to brew award winning fruit beers (bronze medal winner at the 1995 GABF and 2 out of 3 winners at the 1995 AHA Nationals used HopTech fruit flavors, and now so is the 3rd!). They are 100% natural fruit flavors and contain no preservatives. They are added just prior to bottling or kegging so none of the fruit flavor is lost during fermentation. Because they contain no sugars or preservatives, no special calculations are required for priming and yeast growth will not be affected.

Our fruit flavors are supplied in 2 or 4 oz bottles. One bottle is the suggested amount to use for five gallons of beer (except for Cherry which is extra concentrated - one 2 oz bottle makes up to 20 gallons). They come with complete instructions and guidelines for conducting taste trials using small quantities of beer before adding to the whole batch.

Tips and recipe guidelines: For a nice fruit wheat beer, we recommend a 60% wheat and 40% pale malt blend. If you're an extract brewer, this is easiest to accomplish with our wheat malt extracts (or our American Wheat Kit). Go easy on the hops - aim for 15 IBUs or so. Use any of the flavors, but the peach, apricot and raspberry are amazing. Use a standard ale yeast. If you use a "wheat beer" yeast the "clovey" aroma will compete with fruit flavor, but that may be the effect you want (then consider more flavoring to compensate). For stouts or porters, we recommend the blueberry, raspberry or cherry. Lastly, remember that these flavors have no sugar or sweetness, just the real fruit flavor components. We normally associate these flavors with some sweetness, and without it, they don't taste like we might expect (this is most evident with the cherry - this is real cherry, don't expect an artificial "wild cherry" flavor). Therefore, use a less attenuative yeast  to leave more resdual sugars in the beer.