real lemon wheat beer

thanks for all the information and advice.
This is my first attempt at participating.
Anyway has anyone ever used "real lemon" lemon juice to flavor a beer and/or think by adding it at bottling, it would have any good or adverse effect.
I appreciate any input.

waman1

Just add it at to the glass at serving time. That way, if it's gross, you've only ruined one glass of beer.

Srsly, your account is 4 years old and this is your first post?

It has been my experience that lemon zest will work much better for you. I usually put .5 oz with 15 minutes left in the boil. Then I soak another half ounce in Vodka and add it to the secondary. Any time I have added the juice from the lemon I have had issues with head retention.

Others may have better experiences using the juice though.

+1 on the lemon zest. I used about .5oz of lemon zest and .5oz of orange zest during the last 10 of boil on my latest Hefe and it turned our great.

Make sure when you are grating the fresh lemon to only get the yellow part of the skin, the white part is very bitter.

Either zest as mentioned, or a slice of fresh lemon in the glass. Hard to beat a slice of lemon for "real lemon".

thanks for the input. I asked the question because I brewed a 10 gal. batch a week and a half ago.
- 5 gallons are in the secondary on 4 lbs. of blueberries.
- 5 gallons are in the secondary cold conditioning in the fridge.

I am going to put the amount of real lemon in the bottling bucket required to make a half gallon of lemonade. I will rack on top of it with the beer and boiled priming sugar.
I will reply back in a few weeks to let you all know how it turns out.

after 5 days in the fridge I racked it on top of 1/2 cup lemon juice and returned it to the fridge. 4 days later I transferred to my bottling bucket with 3/4 cup priming sugar and bottled. I tasted some that didn't make it to the bottle. It tasted pretty good for being flat, had a good aroma but didn't seem to take on much lemon flavor. Overall I think it's pretty good for my first all grain wheat beer so far. I will have to see how the head retention is in a couple of weeks.

On 8/7 I opened the 1st bottle. It has a decent head and aroma. I didn't like it on my 1st sip, but after half the glass I really enjoyed its zesty effervescence. The beer is very refreshing with about 4.8%ABV. I will probably repeat this wheat next year hopefully earlier in the season.

Sounds great! I may try using some lemon zest on my next wheat beer. American Wheat seems to be my favorite style to brew so a little lemon kick would go excellent in it.

I just realized I wrote That I opened my first bottle on 8/7. Since I haven't perfected time travel yet that was inaccurate. I actually had my 1st bottle on 8/4. Sorry for any confusion.