How is strawberry beer made

A.� Most fruit beer, which is hugely popular in Belgian and France, is basically wheat beer to which fruit juice or syrup is added at the end of fermentation. Belgian breweries sell the beers in small bottles and it's drunk from oddly shaped glasses as much for the taste as the alcohol content. Belgian, America and the Czech Republic are the biggest producers, but a small number of British breweries are turning to fruit beers as an alternative.

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Q.� What flavours of fruit beer are there

A.� Apricot, apple, peach, strawberry, raspberry, cherry and grapefruit are among the flavours being produced. The Belgian raspberry-flavoured, Liefman Frambozen, which comes in a bottle wrapped in paper, and the lemongrass flavoured Thaiphoon, from the Wiltshire brewery Hopback, are among bottles sold in supermarkets and some bars. The lemongrass brew is 4.2 per cent alcohol and is popular among curry eaters. Liefmans Kriekbier, six per cent alcohol, is a cherry flavoured beer, mostly drunk in Europe as an aperitif beer.

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Q.� Is any other beer made in the UK

A.� The Melbourn brothers, who make beer at their brewery in Lincolnshire, produce an apricot flavoured , melbourn Bros Apricot beer, beer�at �3.40 a bottle, which has a growing fanbase. The brewery has a unique brewing process to hone its taste. It is made in the usual way using barley, wheat and hops, but whereas the normal process requires the addition of yeast, the brewer depends on the 'wild' airborne yeasts to trigger spontaneous fermentation.

The Melbourn Brothers brew between October and March only; to do so in summer would be to risk contamination from other unwanted micro-organisms. The beer is then left for a year before whole fruit - strawberry or apricot - is added. This process is unusual because ales generally take three to five days to ferment and lagers three weeks to two months. The result is a low-alcohol 3.4 per cent drink.

St Peter's Brewery in north Suffolk sells around 2,800 bottles a week of elderberry beer and 2,000 grapefruit beer� it started in 1996 and looked to Belgium for inspiration. It now exports to Belgium, France, Holland and Australia.

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By Katharine MacColl