My wife recently asked me to make her a variation of a Belgium Wit that would have a little less orange finish but incorporate a little lemon. The recipe that I am going to attempt to use (extract) includes:
Try using Sorachi Ace as your aroma addition instead of the Hallertau - it has a nice lemony character. And for more lemon you could add the zest of a lemon or two to a hop bag/fine mesh bag, add the bag to your fermenter after fermentation is done. Give it 2 or 3 days, then bottle. Unless you keg, in which case you could add the bag to your keg and pull it when it hits the flavor amount you want. Good luck.
I’d leave out the coriander and use a lot, and I mean a lot of lemon zest at flameout. Post ferment you could also add some but I would want to wash them well or sanitize them. You will get lemon flavour without sour from the zest.
leaving out the coriander is a good suggestion. It provides a lot of the ‘citrus/orange’ character in traditional wit beer. I’d also skip the dried orange peel in favor of fresh citrus zest. meyer lemon in particular makes a wonderful sweet lemon flavor wit.
In addition to the recommendation that you use a wheat-based extract I would also point out that wits typically do not have any hop addition but for bittering. That doesn’t mean you can’t use hops later in the process but it may not line up with what your wife is expecting.
I would look at using lemon zest along with a small amount of ginger. Fresh ginger, not the dried powder stuff you have in the pantry.
Not sure whether you really want a true Belgian wit. But if you do:
you DO need to have (unmalted) wheat. “wit” means “wheat”. Maybe steep wheat flakes?
you DO need coriander. It’s the coriander that provides the citrusy flavor. The orange peel balances this out with its bitterness. The trick is to dose it correctly. I’d say order of magnitude of 0.75 gram per liter. Don’t overdo it.
you DO need witbier yeast, not Belgian Ardennes.
you need to keep the IBUs low, maybe 15 or so.
you DON’T put a slice of lemon in your glass. It’s not classy.
As you can see by the diverse responses, there’s a lot of directions you can take this in. If you wanted to do something similar to a traditional Witbier, I’d simply take a fairly traditional recipe and swap out the orange peel for lemon zest. If you want it to be really lemony, maybe cut the coriander quantity to 25-50% of the original recipe and go heavy on the lemon zest. I do think that you do need at least a little coriander for it to taste like a Wit. I also agree that wheat DME is a better choice than Extra Light and that a true Witbier strain is your best yeast choice.
Out of curiosity, are there many wits brewed in Belgium now ? I always read that the style was almost extinct in Belgium before being revived by Pierre Celis. Didn’t know if he spurred a revival of it there among other breweries like happened here.
Maybe 50 or so. Most of the bigger breweries have one in their portfolio, so there’s about 10 of them that are widespread. But most pubs serve only one kind, normally the one from the brewery that they are affiliated to.
I’m not really a big fan of the style, so I don’t go after them. Apparently it’s a lost art…
I remember that one was part of a beer flight. man, they were all bad, my hand kept on moving hesitantly from one glass to the next. It took me hours to get out of that brewpub.
Like you, I’m not a fan of the style at all. But I will say that Allagash White gets it right. If you’re ever stuck drinking an American Wit again, that would be the example I’d reach for.