Brewing a mango wheat beer at home in mango season

Why wheat beer and mango work

A pale wheat beer has a soft, bready body, low bitterness and a light, fluffy texture. It gives mango room to show. A heavily hopped beer would fight the fruit. A dark beer would bury it. Our guide to brewing a wheat beer at home covers the base beer.

Choose a neutral or lightly fruity yeast, not a German hefeweizen strain. Hefeweizen yeast brings banana and clove, which can clash with mango and make the beer taste like a fruit salad.

A base recipe

For 20 litres at about 1.046 before the fruit:

• Pilsner or pale malt: 2.0 kg (50%)
• Wheat malt: 2.0 kg (50%)
• Hops: a low alpha hop for about 12 to 15 IBU, all at the start of the boil
• Yeast: a clean American ale yeast or a neutral wheat strain

Mash at about 66 °C. Wheat malt has no husk, so a handful of rice hulls helps the wort drain in a mash tun. Ferment at 18 to 20 °C.

Choosing and preparing mangoes

Use fully ripe, fragrant mangoes. Aroma in the fruit becomes aroma in the beer.

• Alphonso is intensely aromatic and sweet, with little fibre.
• Kesar is fragrant with a slightly tangy edge, good in beer.
• Banganapalli is milder and less aromatic, better blended with a stronger variety.
• Totapuri is tart, less sweet and widely used for commercial pulp.

Use about 100 to 200 g of fruit flesh per litre of beer: 2 to 4 kg for 20 litres. Start at the lower end. Peel the fruit, remove the stone and purée the flesh. Bag it and freeze it for a day or two. Freezing ruptures the cells so more juice and aroma come out. It also knocks back some wild microbes.

Tinned mango pulp is convenient and consistent. Read the label. Many pulps contain added sugar, which ferments and raises the alcohol. Some contain preservatives such as sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate, which can stop yeast from fermenting. Use pulp with no preservatives.

When and how to add the fruit

Add the fruit after primary fermentation has slowed, usually around day five to seven. If you add it at the start, the vigorous CO2 strips out the aroma. Add it into a sanitised secondary vessel, or straight into the primary. Rack the beer on top gently.

Mango is around 14 to 16% sugar, so fermentation restarts. Leave space at the top of the fermenter for it. Give it five to seven days, then check the gravity on two separate days. Only bottle when the readings match. Fruit sugar that goes into the bottle unfermented is how fruit beers explode. Our guide to adding fruit to beer covers the general method.

Heat, haze and sediment

In most of India, mango season is also the hottest stretch of the year. A fruit addition in a 35 °C kitchen can ferment fast and hot, adding solvent notes. Keep the fermenter in a water bath with frozen bottles. Our guide to fermenting through an Indian summer has more options.

Mango brings pectin, which can leave a permanent haze. That is fine in this style, but a small dose of pectic enzyme added with the fruit helps if you want a cleaner beer. Expect a thick layer of fruit sediment at the bottom of the fermenter, often several centimetres deep. Rack carefully, leaving the sludge behind. Expect to lose a litre or two of beer to it.

Judging the result

The beer should smell clearly of fresh mango, not jam or cooked fruit. It should finish dry. Too faint means more fruit or a more aromatic variety next time. Sour or vinegary means the fruit carried in bacteria, so freeze it longer and keep everything sanitised. Cooked or jammy means the pulp was heated or the fruit was past its best. Write down the variety, the weight, the day you added it and the gravity before and after. Each of those notes is a clue. Reading them is what turns a fun experiment into a beer you can brew again.