zaireeka wrote:Does someone here have a watermelon wheat beer recipe that involves reducing the watermelon juice? I recently came across such a recipe but cant seem to remember where.
I recommend against reducing watermelon juice. I brewed with it a few years back and figured that the sugar content would be low, so figured i'd want to boil it down to concentrate that and the flavour. started by dicing up the watermelon, removing seeds, and mashing it all, then pushing through a wire mesh strainer to get most juice with little solid matter. the result was sweeter than i expected and had a great watermelon character. But since I had already planned/prepped for reducing it, I continued down that path - more sugar, smaller volume, and more concentrated watermelon flavour all sounded like good things. however, once it reached a boil, there was a quick and very pronounced change - the colour turned more orangey and the flavour/aroma became distinctly non-watermelony. this non-watermelon character carried through to the finished product and I didn't like it at all.
Were I to do it again, I'd probably try to carefully bring a small amount up to pasteurization temp and see if it was still "good" before doing the whole batch. worst case I'd skip this step and throw it into secondary and live with a bit of funk if it came up.
