Is There Fruit In My Beer?

Is There Fruit In My Beer?

19 Nov 2021

by Mick Wust

Not too long ago, if someone told you a certain beer tasted like zingy lime, tangy passionfruit or sticky ripe mango, you’d wonder what was wrong with their tastebuds - or if someone had swapped their beer for a fruit juice. But just like wine connoisseurs and lovers of black coffee, when beer drinkers look for the right words to describe beer flavours, they often come back to fruit.

But the difference is that wine comes from fruit - even if we poke fun at our friends who have a sip of wine and describe the lemon zest, the squashed gooseberry notes or the rockmelon spritz they’re tasting. And coffee comes from a fruit - even if there’s no green apple or sweet raspberry involved in your barista’s favourite single origin coffee beans.

(For the record, don’t be surprised when friends poke fun at you for describing beer as tasting fruity. It’s the price we pay for being passionate, and the best thing we can do is laugh at ourselves as well.)

Beer, on the other hand, is made from hops, malt, yeast and water. So where are these fruit flavours coming from?

Often they’re coming from the hops

When you’re drinking a pale ale or an IPA and getting a face full of citrus, tropical fruits, and stonefruit… you’re smelling and tasting hops.

These little green cones contain volatile essential oils that impart all kinds of aromas and flavours to beer, including spicy, piney and floral notes… but various fruit characters are by far the most common. The range of hop varieties available today gives brewers plenty of options when they’re deciding what kind of beer to make, and what fruity smells and flavours they want in the final product.

So whether you’re enjoying the crisp melon and passionfruit of Hemingway’s Canecutter Lager or the hit of citrus and passionfruit in Good Witch Rye Blond from Cubby Haus, the subtle berry notes in Ballistic’s IPA or the fruity blast of Blackman’s Juicy Banger IPL, tip your hat to the hops that made it happen.

Sometimes they’re coming from the malt

We often think of malt as bringing biscuity and toasty notes, or caramel and toffee sweetness, or dark coffee and chocolate. But the sugars that form in malt can also take on fruity characters, particularly the darker, richer flavours of dried fruits like as raisins, figs and prunes.

Since paler malts are generally less sweet, and darker roasted malts generally carry more bitterness, the sweet spot for fruit flavours in malt is with those red and brown malts in the middle. This is where you’ll get the the raisin notes in The Woodsman Amber Ale from Wolf of the Willows, and the sticky dried fruit in Frenchies’ Astrolabe.

Sometimes they’re coming from the yeast

This is more common in European beer styles. If you’ve ever had a German wheat beer that tastes like banana, then you were tasting a by-product of yeast.

Yeast produces fruity esters when stressed out by factors such as higher temperatures and pressures, so brewers can select their yeast strains and control their processes to bring a fruity complexity to a beer.

If you get your hands on Quakers Hat Saison and Frenchies’ Triple, you can compare the banana and spice notes of these two Belgian-style beers.

Sometimes it’s from fruit

Of course, sometimes the reason you can taste fruit in your beer is because there’s fruit in your beer. Adding fruit to beer has been done for many, many years, but brewers are always finding new and interesting ways to play around with the practice. And while they have to deal with the hard work of balancing flavours and making sure cans don’t explode due to fruit refermenting, drinkers get the easy pleasure of enjoying fruity beer!

Sour beers are the most common place to find fruit - check out Six Strings’ Pinoy Fiesta Pineapple Gose, Dad & Dave’s Dragon Fruit Sour, or Aether’s Witching Hour Blackberry Sour. But as long as breweries like Urban Alley will experiment putting strawberry into a hazy pale ale like The Dreaming of Summer, and breweries like Yulli’s will keep making their Amanda Mandarin IPA, we’ll never run out of ways to enjoy fruit in beer.