We didn't use just any old fruit here folks - we went into the mountains around Canberra in the heat of Summer and picked the wild fruit ourselves

There's a lot of hot water in this one so it is difficult to get water down to pitching temp depending on cold water temp - ours was pitched at around 30 deg Celsius - probably a bit too high

As with previous Irish Velvet, the yeast was very sluggish to start then became quite active by Day 3 - possibly due to higher pitching temp or type of yeast provided

We tried straining blackberry liquor into fermenter to avoid fruit solids blocking filler tube during bottling but found the blackberry pulp just blocked all the sieves we had

Not wanting to lose all the pulp flavouring, we threw the whole lot in and decided to solve and filler blocking problems as they arose 

Blockage of the filler at bottling did indeed cause a problem and necessitated dismantling and unblocking of the filler valve several times

Had we a spare fermenter available at bottling, we would have strained the brew into that prior to bottling (as we did with the Blackberry Wheat)

All the fruit was consumed in fermentation, leaving only berry skins and seeds behind pureeing the fruit prior to fermenting probably helped in this regard

Flavour at bottling was nothing short of brilliant and promises to mature into a very pleasant stout

The Chocolate Malt and Coffee provided just the right amount of body

The Roasted Barley provided a very light smoky background flavour

Can't think of anything we'd change next time around