Experimental Success at the brewery!!

I was recently presented with three quarts of frozen persimmons, a fruit I had never heard of, and challenged to brew a beer with it. This fruit is not for the faint of heart, et me tell you.

Persimmons are only edible when they are ripe, which happens about thirty seconds before they fall off the tree and the deer eat them. When they are, they taste like a weak apricot. Naturally I thought of a wheat beer for this experiment.

These things have 4 huge seeds in the middle and a pulpy texture, making it impossible to cleanly de-seed them. I ended up with about three cups of tomato-paste like material which I flash-cooked to kill any undesirable bacteria and threw the goop in the secondary. I then went to Texas for a week.

When I came back I racked the beer into a keg and prayed. Two days later I poured myself a pint of beer that looked like cloudy grapefruit juice. All the yeasty, slightly sour characteristics of a wheat are there, along with a faint fruit flavor I would never be able to identify if I did not know what it was.

Bottom line, this turned into a great beer that I really hope to brew again some time. Even my wife, who historically has only liked our Apricot Wheat, voluntarily poured herself a pint stating "I like the fruity wheat beers". What else can I say?