My Wit might be lacking...

I brewed a wit last night, and everything went pretty well. During the mash I zested a couple of oranges and weighed it up. My small Stainless cup wouldn't hold all of the zest loosely, so I packed it down just a bit and managed to fit it all in. Then I sat it on the counter while I crushed the coriander and waited for the end of the boil.

When the timer went off I dumped the orange zest and coriander into the kettle and went to rig up the CFC. Then I turned off the flame and started prechilling the chiller while I brought the kettle into the house and started draining the hops bag with the orange zest in it.

As I pulled out the hops bag and dumped it's contents, I found an INTACT glob of orange zest the size and shape of the stainless cup I used. I tried breaking it up and adding back into the kettle, but it was pretty firm. I managed to break it into some smaller pieces and let it steep for a minute or two, but I wonder how much orange flavor and aroma I'm going to get now.

I'll remind myself not to pack the zest at all, and to prepare it just before the boil is over too. And I wonder if I should try dry hopping this batch with more zest when the fermentation is complete...

Homercidal said:

And I wonder if I should try dry hopping this batch with more zest when the fermentation is complete...

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There's nothing wrong with this. You may want to wrap your siphon tube with sanitized cheese cloth before siphoning into a bottling bucket or keg though.

Go ahead and taste it after a week, if it needs more just clean the orange real good and sanatize your equipment and pitch directly into your primary or secondary and taste it again in a week or two. If you want you could even make an orange extract with vodka and add when you bottle.

I always do a loose zest and never weigh it. I keep track of how many oranges I use for the recipe.

I thought about just spritzing the orange with starsan and calling it good. Zest it up and add right to the primary after the initial ferment was done.

That should do it. You might have some floaters and some that will sink down to the bottom. You should be able to rack under the floaters or filter it out with the above metioned bag on siphon tube.

If you have a microplane zester you'll get lots of surface area too. Those things are great.