One of the great things about making your own wine and beer is the freedom to do pretty much anything you like. One of the things I’ve become interested in recently is making beer/wine hybrids.

I started this journey with a load of cherries I picked from the trees at the seminary grounds near my home. Originally I made a cherry wine and fermented it out, pressed the cherries and saved the pressed cherries to re-ferment in a Cherry Mead (melomel). Once I had pressed the cherries a second time I decided I would use them once again, this time in a beer.

I brewed up a dark hoppy wort and added the pressed charries to it once I had cooled it to pitching temperature. The yeast was supplied by the residual yeast that was left hanging out in the cherries (originally the cherry wine was fermented with Montrachet yeast). The beer turned out quite well. It has a slight cherry flavor that becomes more pronounced as the beer warms, a nice hoppy flavor and aroma balance the dark malts well.

So next I decided I would try something similar using the pressed grapes from my marquette vines. I only had enough grapes this year to make a small one gallon batch of wine but I figured I’d dump it into a 5 gallon batch of beer anyway. I brewed up a sort of belgian wit but substituted some of the malt with sucrose to replace what had already been fermented out of the grapes. It fermented down nicely, I was worried that it might end up too dry but there is enough residual sweetness to balance the spices and hops. The flavor of the grapes is present but subdued, likely due to the small amount of grapes relative to the volume of the batch of beer.

I’ve been very pleased with these two experiments and plan to continue playing with this idea in making beer from the fruit/lees of wines. I think my next experiment will be making a wine with an ale yeast, probably a belgian strain and then building a beer on top of the remains.