Brewers and Vintners

Fruit vs. Puree vs. Concentrates

Coloma Frozen Foods (Nature Blessed) offers fruit purees and concentrates for brewers, vintners, and similar businesses. These items include our wide line of frozen IQF fruits, frozen fruit puree, and pure juice concentrates. All off our fruits are Non-GMO. The frozen fruit products are available in either 30# or 40# cartons or 28# pails depending upon the item. Our concentrates are normally available in quarts, 1.5 gallon, 3 gallon, 5 gallon pails, and 52 gallon drums. Considering the sizes of the concentrates we offer, they are very applicable for home brewing and wine making as well as the commercial beer and wine maker.

Fruit

All of the IQF (individually quick frozen) fruit are harvested at the peak of maturity, processed, and frozen. There is no sugar added to any IQF fruit.
Benefits: nothing better than fresh whole fruit. However, there are drawbacks with transporting, harvest times, availability year round, storage, just to name a few.

Puree

Puree is 100% natural fruit that has been processed and passed through a 0.33 inch screen to eliminate seeds, skin, etc. However, the actual pulp of the product is in the puree. Some of the uses of this product are for seedless jam and jellies. There are many wineries and breweries that also use puree products. Note: There is no sugar added to any of our purees.

Concentrates

If you survey 100 different home and commercial brewers as well as home and commercial wine makers, concerning which is better, concentrates or pure fruit, you will get 100 different answers. Simply put, fruit concentrates are pure juice with the water taken out. Nothing added, nothing else taken away except the water. It can be reconstituted by simply adding water. Whole fruit is pressed to remove the juice. The raw juice is filtered to remove the pulp. The filtered juice is heated under a vacuum to evaporate the water at a lower temperature than boiling to help preserve the natural attributes of the juice. Most fruit juices are concentrated to about 60 - 70 brix. Brix, is the unit to measure the amount of soluble solids. The brix of our concentrates as well as the brix of ‘standard’ single strength are listed below on the chart. Each year the various crop will vary slightly and each application may require a slightly different concentration, the values on the chart are only a guide line.

Concentrate Applications

There are many applications for our concentrates. With 30 different varieties of concentrates, we have something for everyone. Our concentrates are made from 100% fruit juices. No additives, artificial sweeteners, or other ingredients are used.

Brewing

Many of the 30 different concentrates are excellent to use as flavorings and in the fermentation processes for our breweries, hard cideries, wineries, distilleries, and meaderies. Breweries use many of the fruits concentrates for making your individual IPA’s and Sour’s. Many of our brewers will add our concentrates in the secondary for flavor. All of our concentrates are from non-GMO fruit. The only ingredient for the concentrates are the fruit itself. Some of our customers also blend some of the concentrates together for more unique results. We have heard of some of them blending products together, for instance, lemon and lime together for a new flavor. There is a group of brewers that make soda at their site, such as lemon/lime or orange. Black currant is a very popular concentrate among the mead makers.

Jam/Jelly

Aside from the brewing industry, many of our customers manufacture jam and jellies. This group of customers will use our white grape to add in their process so they can claim, ‘No Sugar Added’ to some product. Many of this group of customers also use the lemon concentrate to adjust the pH of the fruit so that the pectin will work the best.

Standard Cider

Many standard cider operations use our concentrates to make blends of their homemade ciders. The most popular are apple mixed with cherry, mango, or red raspberry among others.

Please see our complete list below.

Concentrates Facts and Benefits

• All concentrates are pure fruit juices
• No additives
• Non-GMO
• The only ingredient is Fruit
• Product never freezes solid
• Able to be shipped by UPS (except drums)
• Economical to ship (not shipping water)
• Storage, when frozen, 2 years
• For use, thaw container, use what you need from container, promptly refreeze the balance for storage.

In conversation with our brewer friends, there are a few options to use our all natural fruit juice concentrates at different stages of the process in order to enhance the final outcome. A few will introduce the concentrates at the beginning of the fermentation process. This facilitates the conversion of natural sugars to alcohol, however, there will not be much impact on the taste of the final product, as the fermentation process will “consume” much of the flavor profile of the fruit concentrate juice. Many brewers will ‘back sweeten’ the product to bring back the flavor. Most brewers will add the concentrate just before the secondary (fermentation). More of the fruit flavor will be captured in the end product. This will leave a subtle fruity taste as well as some of the sweetness from the concentrate.

Caution: When adding the fruit concentrate before the secondary, there will probably be sugars left in your product from the concentrate. It is very important to be sure all yeast activity is terminated. Most of the brewers we talk with will either pasteurize the product or add nitrites, as do the wine makers. If the yeast is not terminated, fermentation will probably continue.

Fresh cider

Our friends who make fresh cider often add one or more juice concentrates to create a very unique flavor. This may also slightly increase the sugar level, or brix, of the final product. Popular concentrates used for this purpose include red tart cherry, red raspberry, blueberry, and mango.