Andy's Orange Wheat Ale 1.1

Last year, I designed an orange wheat recipe that turned out pretty phenomenally. In an attempt to replicate that success, I brewed up the next iteration yesterday. It's essentially the same recipe as before, modified slightly to accommodate ingredient availability.


Andy's Orange Wheat Ale 1.1

• 8 oz. 15°L crystal malt
• 5 lbs. Bavarian Wheat Dry Malt Extract (Briess; 3.0 SRM; 65% wheat, 35% barley)
• 2 oz. Liberty hops pellets
• 1 tsp. Irish moss
• 1 package American Hefeweizen Ale Yeast (White Labs WLP320)
• 5 fresh Valencia oranges

Directions

• I heated 3 gallons of water to ~158°, and steeped the crystal malt for one hour. Then, I sparged with a half gallon of water (plus ~2 cups, to bring it up to 3.67 gallons).
• I heated the brew kettle to a boil and turned off the heat. Then, I added the dry malt extract.
• Meanwhile, I zested the peel of five medium-sized Valencia oranges (fresh-picked, without the nasty wax coating you get in the grocery store), resulting in 1.35 oz. (wet) of peel. I was very careful not to go down to the white part of the peel, which is too bitter. Then, I peeled and sliced up three of the oranges (the remainder went to make fresh juice - delicious!). I put those oranges and orange peel in a hop sack and placed them in a saucepan with 1/2 gallon of water. I heated this to just boiling, and turned off the heat to let it soak (~45 minutes).
• Once the wort mixture came to a boil again, I added 1 oz. of the Liberty hops. After 55 total minutes of boil, I added another ounce of Liberty hops. After 60 minutes, I chilled the wort.
• The Irish moss was added after 45 minutes of boiling.
• I poured the wort into the primary fermenter and added the hot mixture of orangey water, slices, and peel. I topped the fermenter up with cold water to 5 gallons, and pitched the yeast. The temperature was 78°, and starting gravity was 1.046 (adjusted for temperature).
• I plan to let this ferment in the primary for 10 days before bottling.

Rainy Day IPA 1.2 bottled

After nearly three weeks of dry hopping in the secondary fermenter, it was time to bottle my Rainy Day IPA (version 1.2). So, yesterday I added 3/4 cup of priming sugar (boiled in 2 cups of water) and did the bottling thing.

The end yield was 3 22-oz. bottles, 13 18-oz. bottles, and 18 12-oz bottles (a little over 4 gallons of beer total). At time of bottling there was a great hop aroma, and the flavor is clean, smooth, and hoppy. The beer has a great dark copper color (maybe I'll lighten it up a bit for the next version?). We'll see how a few weeks of bottling condition play with it. . .because I used hop pellets, there was a fair bit of loose hop sediment. Most of it ended up on the bottom of the carboy, but there was still a little in suspension.

Final gravity was same as before, 1.012 at 70° F, down from 1.060. Thus, the estimated a.b.v. is 6.4%.