In a month or so the best fruit in the world will be at its peak: organic blood oranges from Sicily. Any suggestions to make the best damn blood orange saison in this and a massive amount of parallel universes?
I especially want to avoid the beer to taste like cheap soap, because that’s what beer with orange peel can taste like if one is not careful.
I make fruit beers regularly for my wife. I say rack to secondary onto the juice, and when you keg add some zest ( carefully leaving the white pith behind) in a bag that you can pull when the flavor is where you want. Sample every day or two to monitor.
Yes, well, that’s the basic procedure I also had in mind, except that I bottle my beer. But is that sufficient to avoid the cheap soap taste?
what does cheap soap taste like to you?
I’ve heard that citrus when fermented tastes like vomit unless you know some special trick.
I’ve mentioned the vomit thing a few times. Tasted it at a festival. Sadly, it was poured by a guy from my club. Maybe he used nasty store brand oj, but it was nasty.
I’ve always heard that too. But I don’t know, Major makes a grapefruit IPA with sections of the fruit in secondary and zest in keg. And Zymurgy had a Kumquat Wheat recipe that used halved kumquats in secondary IIRC. But the OP could always use zest only, except it sounds like he’s had issues with the zest. Might be a good one to use a gallon of the batch to test out instead of the whole thing.
Maybe it was mercaptan. I don’t even know how mercaptan forms. Light?
I wonder. There must be some mechanism that brings that stuff out sometimes. I know a guy that tried a citrus beer once and said something similar to you - I never tried it. I’ve used zest tons of times, which doesn’t give issues obviously, but I’ve used halved tangerines in the secondary a couple times in witbier. The beers were good. Maybe it is light. It’d be nice to know what the trigger is.
…or maybe there’s just a threshold for the amount of citrus juice you can use and be good. Past that, not good.
Actually, it didn’t really taste like soap, but rather like the artificial citrus flavor of cheap soap.
Sorry to be specific, but does the “vomit” refer to the smell/taste of gastric acid? That seems to consist mostly of hydrochloric acid? And that is HCl. Where would then the chlorine come from?
Well i think they mean its LIKE vomit, not IS vomit.
“Butyric acid is present in, and is the main distinctive smell of, human vomit”
So what is the cause?
I used blood orange in a Belgian Strong Golden a few years ago, and really liked the way it came out. I used the zest in the kettle at knock-out, and added the juice to the secondary. I think it was 2 oranges for 5 gallons.
I know the issue that others here are describing with citrus fruit, and I’ve tasted that in others’ beer. However, I’ve also used grapefruit and Mandarin oranges in beers with great success, and never had that off flavor issue.
I think if you go fairly light on the citrus fruit itself and heavy on citrussy flavor and aroma hops, you can create a very citrussy profile in the beer without the problems associated with fermenting large amounts of fruit.
For his blood orange Hefe Sam Calagione recommends pasteurizing zest & fruit before adding it to primary. You also add the zest at knock-out. Would that be better than adding to secondary?
What would these be?
The aforementioned puke and soap flavors.