[color=blue]
> I wanted to brew up a strawberry beer for the ladies so I started with a
> simple all extract lager recipe, 4 lbs of mashed strawberries and about a
> pound of honey. The brew went fine and I added the strawberries at the end
> (after I cut the heat to the boil and let things cool down a bit) to
> pasteurize things but now here's my question... did I make a mistake by
> leaving the fruit in the carboy during the reaction? I definitely plan a
> secondary pitch as soon as the reaction stops but for some reason I have a
> bad feeling about leaving the fruit in there while the yeast does it's job.[/color]

Not an expert on fruit beers (never done one), but most folks seem to
recommend freezing the clean fruit to burst the cells, then just dumping
them into the secondary. The idea of the secondary is to reduce the
activity of the primary fermentation and maybe keep a little more of
the aroma (since there will be less CO2 flowing out to "scrub" the aroma
out as well). So... having the fruit in there with the yeast should be
no problem at all!

Derric