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Telegraph

The best fruit beers to drink this summer

The background on fruit beers Traditionalists may balk at the idea of fruit in beer, but it's nothing new. Belgian brewers were adding local sour cherries to lambic beers a hundred years ago. Kriek, as cherry lambics are known, paved the way for experimentation with raspberries and peach in Belgium. And gradually, where they have led, the rest of the world has followed. It's now difficult to think of a fruit that hasn't been used to boost flavour in brewing. How fruit beers are made The simplest way of making a fruit beer is to pour a shandy or the German equivalent, a radler. Shandy is usually part beer and part lemonade, while a radler can be mixed with any type of fruit juice. Alternatively, one can brew directly with the fruit. It can be added to the hot wort (the porridge-like mix of mashed grain and water that is the first stage of the brewing process) or introduced after fermentation to give a purer fruit character. To get a more pronounced fruit flavour, some brewers use syrups or concentrates. It takes skill – and a good quality concentrate – to pull this off without the finished beer tasting synthetic or overly sweet. Fruit sours, which can be made using any of the methods above, are increasingly popular in the UK. Traditionally these beers are aged slowly, allowing yeast and bacteria to change their flavour over time. But fruited sours can also be made quickly and with more control by kettle souring – adding lactobacillus bacteria to the wort and killing it by boiling when the right level of sourness is attained. Why you can trust us