Chequer Tree fruit

[scuppeteer]

Bit of a long shot considering this trees rarity these days, but does anyone have any knowledge of brewing with the fruit.
A friend of mine has one on her farm and asked if I would like some to make a brew with. No idea how, what quantity or whether to put in the boil or steep?
I found a post on here which is several years old and is not overly helpful.
Any ideas even if you haven't used the actual fruit but have used others in a brew would be most appreciated.

Cheers

[crafty john]

I have looked on the net and there seems to be a lot of links to reading about brewing with them but no recipes, maybe you could ask this guy http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/cambridgesh ... 639876.stm

I am sure you could find him on facebook I cant believe I jut said that word, I hate facebook god I said it again.

Good luck with the chequer brew, keep us posted.

[crafty john]

Or you could make a cake http://ramblingsofanaturalist.blogspot. ... rries.html

[seymour]

SO JEALOUS!!! Needless to say, I've never had access to chequer fruit, but I've brewed many beers from other wild harvested fruits.

I made a good figgy porter: mashed a basic porter recipe, separately pureed several pounds of figs with water, stewed them a bit to counteract the wild yeasts, etc, then poured the clumpy fruit mix into the wort in the fermentor and pitched an English ale yeast as usual. I'll be honest: when the time came to rack this sticky chunky mess from primary to secondary, it was labor-intensive and messy, involving a few steps, pouring through loose colander, finer strainer, etc. A normal racking tube definitely won't work. Also, I unexpectedly ended up getting a big lambic pellicle. Not sure if it came from the fruit skins or airborne infection during my lengthy transfer process. My point is, be as careful as you can.

I've read that chequer fruit is horribly astringent until fully ripe, which makes me think of persimmons and paw-paws, both of which I've collected from the wild and brewed in beer. Bletting helps: simply forcing them to ripen after being picked, almost to the point of rotting. Try placing in a paper bag with an overripe apple, the natural methane speeds things up. Or, you can use your freezer to breakdown the astringency: freeze them for several days, thaw, freeze, thaw, etc, simulating what happens on the ground in nature (minus all the hungry critters.) Lastly--and I especially liked the results of this method--you can follow crafty john's recommendation and make "fruitcake" or "bread" first. Puree the fruit with some water, blend with some barley or whole-wheat flour to make a gloopy dough, spread out on a cookie sheet and bake a long time in medium heat as you would crackers or flatbread. When it's cooked through and smells delicious, allow it to cool and dry. This is a delicous way to convert and caramelize natural sugars, and is an historically-accurate alternative to malting/mashing. Select a basic English ale recipe, then crumble your crackery "chequer cake" into the mash tun with the rest of the grainbill. It'll probably be a stickier mash and slower sparge than you're used to, but otherwise proceed as normal. Ferment and enjoy a rare glimpse into the past!

[scuppeteer]

Thanks guys, I've emailed the chap from the brewery, waiting for a reply.

Seymour would you add hops to the recipe or brew as you would a proper ale.

Cheers

[seymour]

Seymour would you add hops to the recipe or brew as you would a proper ale.

If I understand your question correctly, my answer is yes. When done correctly, the fruit will add sweetness, not astringency. So you'll still need your normal hops balance. My batches I described all began as basic Amber Ale or Brown Ale recipes, complete with modest hop additions. I always think of the fruit as a flavor addition to an already good beer, not a replacement for a regular beer ingredient. That's just my personal philosophy for these things.

That said, I've tasted some interesting beers which used herbs, juniper, etc, as a bittering agent instead of hops, so there's no absolute right or wrong.

[scuppeteer]

Thanks Seymour.
What I meant by "proper ale" is the correct old English definition when beer was brewed hundreds of years ago before the use of hops. I think I would be very unkeen to make a beer without hops as I have no experience of doing so. Your methods look great if a little fiddly.
I am thinking of brewing quite a dark beer, but not too bitter with some fruity hops and then adding the fruit as you suggested. Watch this space in a couple of months when i have got the Chequers from my friend.

[seymour]

Thanks Seymour.
What I meant by "proper ale" is the correct old English definition when beer was brewed hundreds of years ago before the use of hops. I think I would be very unkeen to make a beer without hops as I have no experience of doing so. Your methods look great if a little fiddly.
I am thinking of brewing quite a dark beer, but not too bitter with some fruity hops and then adding the fruit as you suggested. Watch this space in a couple of months when i have got the Chequers from my friend.

Sounds good, I'm looking forward to hearing what you do!

[seymour]

Bump.

An old thread, scuppeteer, but I was wondering if you ever brewed your Chequer Ale? It's that time of year again, right?

I've been researching Chequer fruit, technially from the Sorbus torminalis tree, in the rowan family (syn. Torminalis clusii) or "Wild Service Tree", but I still haven't found any true Chequer beer recipes. Search for rowan berry recipes, too, the usage would be interchangeable. When you find wine recipes, simply replace the sugar and grape juice with your tried-and-true English ale grainbill.



See also:
Sorbus torminalis wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbus_torminalis

Descriptive list of Sorbus drinks, http://rowanswhitebeamsandservicetrees. ... rinks.html

Rowan berry wine recipe: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... berry-wine

Mountain Ash Wine (the native American form of Sorbus trees): http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/mtnash.asp

Also, check out Patrick Roper's response to a Zythophile blog post:

There is some evidence that cider, or cidre, meant fermented juice extracted from fruit other than grapes and was not originally attached specifically to apples.

Consider this line from 16th C French writer Charles Estienne: “faire le cidre, pommé, peré, cormé” (to make cider, apple, pear, sorb.). Cormé, a low alcohol drink made from the fruit of the true service tree (Sorbus domestica), is considered by many to be cognate with the Gaulish word ‘curmi’. This has been taken to mean beer, but maybe it was true service tree cider, also known as boisson de cormes’. A closely related fruit, that of the wild service or chequer tree (Sorbus torminalis), had a close relationship with Chequers Inns in South East England, but we are not entirely sure why despite many intelligent guesses. Maybe they made chequer tree cider using either pure torminalis juice or mixing it with apple juice cider as is done with true service juice in the highly regarded German Speierling-Apfelwein.

‘Curmi’ is supposedly cognate with Irish ‘cuirm’ and Welsh ‘cwrw’ both nowadays words for ‘beer’. Maybe originally they meant fruit cider: was Irish beer originally cider? Was the Welsh diod griafol (rowan drink) one one of this family of beverages? Made from rowan berries John Evelyn said “ale or beer brewed with these berries, being ripe, is an incomparable drink”. In Estonia they crush and press the juice from rowan berries (Sorbus aucuparia) and make a ‘cider’ from it called pihlakavein (rowan wine) for which they clearly have a high regard. Maybe this is what the Welsh were doing, or maybe they were simply adding the berries to beer when they were brewing (as the proprietor of the Chequers in Little Gransden, Hunts, has recently done with wild service fruit).

Then there is the issue of cerevisia, cervoise in French which appears to have been a barley based drink with various fruit juices, herbs and other stuff (but not hops) added. This, of course, is where the Spanish word ‘cerveza’ meaning ‘beer’ comes from but, in my view, the ‘service’ in ‘service tree’ is not, as is frequently suggested, related to cerevisia, it is simply a corruption of Latin ‘sorbus’.