Amoretti Craft Purée
We discovered puree maker Amoretti at the Craft Brewers Conference in April and were intrigued by their claim that adding fruit flavors to beer was as simple as pumping a single squeeze of their shelf-stable craft puree into a glass of beer. We’re not ones to adulterate our beer with extra additives (no green beer for St. Patrick’s day here), but still we wondered—could we discern a difference between beer dosed with puree after packaging and beer where the flavor was added during the brewing process?
We assembled a test panel of five people and blindly sampled four different beers—two dosed with one pump of Amoretti blood-orange puree per 12 ounces of beer and two brewed with blood oranges that are reviewed later in this issue. We did not tell them the parameters of the test ahead of time and simply asked for rank order of preference and any tasting notes they might have about the beers’ aroma and flavor. Results were split, with one of the dosed beers in a dead tie for best score with one of the brewed orange beers. Reviewers were also split on their favorite of the grouping, with each beer receiving one first place vote and one of the dosed beers receiving two first place votes. Once we shared the test parameters, testers were unable to consistently identify the dosed beers. The puree is effective at adding fruit flavor, and the character of that fruit flavor is well in line with the expectations of tasters sampling a range of beers with that flavor.
With the taste and aroma question settled, that leaves the question of whether we’d leave a pump of puree next to our taps or beer fridge to add flavor to beer. While the company suggests breweries might add a pump to beers in their taproom (like adding a shot of flavor to coffee) and they offer commercial scale lots for adding puree in the brewing process, we think this is also a solid option for homebrewers who might like to vary their home tap offerings with a few purees. —Jamie Bogner