A buddy and I recently enjoyed a brown ale at a local Oklahoma brewery.  During our conversation, I mentioned how much I missed New Belgium’s Frambozen, a raspberry brown ale that used to unofficially “begin” the new year for family and friends when we lived in the Denver area.  The beer has since been discontinued as a regular seasonal — although my wife and I recently spotted two bottles of Imperial Frambozen with Cocoa in Asheville.  Sensing my enthusiasm, he asked, “Why don’t we brew it next?  It sounds perfect for fall and winter.”  Our quest began!

After a few years of casual homebrewing, we welcomed the excitement.  It was the first time we had brewed anything with fruit, and truly the first time attempting to reverse engineer a beer.  (Previous cloning attempts had consisted of following other homebrewers’ recipes, with minor tweeks to yeast strains or grains.)  Our challenge was in recreating a brown ale that (a) is no longer available for tasting, and (b) had the right amount of balance with the sweet raspberries.  Several resources were helpful, but this blog post by a New Belgium brewer proved most helpful.  In addition to painting a nice picture of the beer’s profile, Jake offered guidance on the fruit- (or pulp) to-beer ratio.

Once secondary had finished, we racked the brown (2 gallons) over two 12 oz. bags of frozen raspberries.  (We worried that fresh fruit, even sanitized, would not be as safe a bet as using fresh fruit, which was flash-frozen.)  We “ground” the raspberries within the freezer bag prior to adding to the carboy.  After six days, we bottled.

The beer tastes great!  Friends have loved the malty brown mixed with the sour, fresh taste of the raspberries.  Compared to the base brown — which we kegged — this beer has a wonderful reddish hue and an incredible aroma.  In hindsight, we maybe should have only had the beer rack for 3-4 days (to slightly reduce the raspberry taste), but no complaints about how this one turned out.  Cheers!