The flavor-packed dragon fruit brings more than playful style and subtle sweetness to cocktails and ales. The pretty pink cactus fruit, also known as pitaya, packs a nutrient-dense wallop for health conscious consumers.
Modern brewers use purees to capture the essence of fresh fruits in season. Seasonal craft brews capture the soul of each season with the intense fresh fruit flavors of purees. For spring beers, brewers choose from juicy stone fruits like apricot, peaches, and plums. Summer brews boast cherries, strawberries, and watermelon. In the fall, apple ciders and pumpkin ales are inevitable. But what do brewers do with winter, a season that doesn’t exactly scream fresh fruit?
Over the last couple of years, Americans have begun to experiment with a wider variety of flavors at home, creating a new appreciation for novel culinary experiences. As a result, more consumers are beginning to think and behave like foodies, which has led to experimental brewers integrating more exotic ingredients into craft beers.
Americans eat around fifteen pounds of watermelon annually per capita. Statistically, if you aren’t eating watermelon right now, somebody in your family is probably picking up your slack. It’s easily the most popular of the melons, and it’s a staple of cookouts, beach trips, and family reunions. Naturally, that makes watermelon a perfect pairing for beer, another warm weather favorite.
Mango’s rich, mellow perfume has the ability to enhance the sweetness of fruity beers or to accentuate the hops in beers with more bite. In recent years, craft brewers have had great success combining mango pureé with Simcoe, Citra, Cascade and Galaxy hops, to name just a few.
Strawberries are a popular pureé among brewers because the humble berry has so much to offer. It’s a popular mainstay flavor that simply cannot be engineered in a laboratory.
Blueberry alcoholic beverages experienced an 89% growth between 2019 and 2020, when Firmenich Flavors named the humble berry the flavor of the year. Its popularity hasn’t diminished since then. In fact, while the Maine native has often been associated with summertime, many food and beverage brands have been incorporating blueberries into their fall menus this year.
Cherries are, in many ways, iconic. They’re part of the collective culture, and cherry has remained a favorite stand-alone or medley flavor throughout culinary history. The sweet and sour fruit’s popularity is still growing,
While modern market goers may not be familiar with black currants yet, this piquant berry was a staple summer fruit of farmhouses and monasteries in bygone days. It’s been a versatile ingredient in European ales, wines, and preserves for centuries, adding an earthy sweetness and a floral aroma to beverages and dishes.
The Concord grape is a plump, purple enigma. On the one hand, this earthy grape from the American Northeast is an instantly recognizable fruit flavoring for candies, jams, and sodas. On the other hand, Concord grapes are so intensely grape-flavored that some people assume it can’t be real. It’s too musky and rich and deep. That’s because Concord grapes are “fox grapes,” whereas most table grapes and wine grapes are European vinifera cultivars.
