Some of you know I started a brewing club here at my university this year for the undergrads in my department. After going through one of the just-add-water extract porter kits and watching/helping me with a couple of my brews, I pushed the club into an all-grain batch of their own.

They came up with the thought of making a strawberry beer because KAIST has a tradition every spring they call strawberry parties. The student council buys hundreds of kilos of berries and sells them off for cheap so everyone can have picnics around campus. Anyway, the brewing club bought a few kilos of berries and came up with the following recipe for a 20L batch:

Malt bill:
Pilsner - 2.2 kg
Wheat - 1.9 kg
Carapils - 0.3 kg
Caramunich II - 0.2 kg

Hops:
Tettnanger (4% aa) - 38 g (@60min)

We mashed for 75 min at 67C with a 10 min mash-out at 76C.
We did a 90 min boil, put the lid on the kettle, and threw it in a big refrigerator to chill overnight.

Fermented with S-04 for a week and racked to secondary.

In secondary, we added 2 kilos of strawberries that had been washed, de-stemmed, quartered, briefly sanitized in starsan, frozen and thawed. We added them in a sanitized grain bag for easy removal.

After a week in secondary, we cold-crashed the beer and bottled with enough white sugar to prime at 2.5 volumes of co2.

I just cracked the first bottle and it smells like strawberries. It is a tangy, fruity beer that all the nearby Koreans want to buy. It isn't as much my cup of tea as a big fat double IPA would be, but what the hell, right?


By the way, the strawberries were ugly as can be when we took them out.