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added section "When To Add Fruit"
Some producers use the term maceration to describe the addition of fruit or herbs to a beer. Maceration in beer is the extraction of flavor-active and colored compounds as well as other constituents of fruits and herbs by soaking them in the beer. The rate at which compounds are extracted during maceration depends on factors such as temperature and pH.
==When To Add Fruit==
When to add the fruit depends on the style of beer and what the brewer is going for. Generally, fruit is added after a sour or mixed fermentation beer has finished aging and maturing. This preserves the fruit character more than other methods. For example, a mixed fermentation sour beer might take 6-12 months for the ''Brettanomyces'' character to develop fully. After this development, the fruit should be added, and then aged for another 1-2 months. For a kettle sour, the same rule applies; if the kettle sour is done fermenting after two weeks, fruit can be added at that time.
Another method would be to add the fruit earlier on during the aging process. This can help extract more from fruit skins or seeds, but some of the more delicate aromas and flavors of the fruit could age out of the beer in that time. For example, Belgian kriek style beers are sometimes aged on cherries for ~6 months, which is believed the time required to extract character from the pits.
A combination of adding fruit earlier on in the fermentation, and then again after the beer has matured is another technique that brewers have used.
==Aging Vessels and Refermentation==