Help with developing a Grapefruit Wheat

Hi All-

My buddy and I are going to be brewing up a Harpoon UFO clone at the weekend, and we decided that a grapefruit hefe would be pretty tasty.

Problem is, I've never brewed with fruit before and haven't been able to find much information on using citrus, beyond orange peel in the boil.

Can anyone suggest an appropriate amount of fruit for a 5-gal batch? We're looking for a distinct grapefruit flavour but not a ton of additional sweetness.

Would it make sense to add zest during the boil instead of racking onto the fruit in secondary? Any idea what would happen if we did both?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

I've had a difficult time with citrus, peel or otherwise in beers other than belgian wits...most of that fades pretty fast.

SInce it's grapefruit you are looking for, although you could (and should) add some grapefruit zest in the beer, you best bet is looking at the hops that lend the most grapefruity flavors and aromas.

There are several varieties that impart really strong grapefruit notes to it...

You will find a good discussion in this thread; https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/grapefruit-flavor-hops-20814/

ANd this from the similar threads box..https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/pulling-grapefruit-flavor-out-36723/

But you can also google "grapefuit hops" and see what varieties come up more than others.

Email this guy [email protected]. He runs The Covey, www.thecovey.com, in Fort Worth TX. He has made a prickly pear beer form cactus that tastes just like grapefruit.

I have been looking to do the same and the hops that keep comeing up are the "C" hops summit and sorachi ace. I would like to know about Citra hops to but haven't heard much.

Thanks for the insight, guys. It hadn't occurred to me to get the flavour from citrusy hop varieties, but that makes a lot of sense.

I talked it over with one of my coworkers today and he suggested either making a fruit tea (bonus points for sterilisation, plus the ability to dial in the intensity by adding a bit at a time) or just making sure to get rid of all the seeds and peel and that stringy white crud (that I'm sure has a proper name, but escapes me) to avoid any tannic or otherwise off flavours if we end up racking directly on the fruit.

Since we already have a kit's worth of UFO hops, I think we're just going to be bold and see how it turns out with the fruit, but I'm planning on making a wit in the medium term and will definitely use the hopping advice.

If anyone's still interested to see how this turns out, I'll try and post as and when I get some results to this tho.

Cheers!

Yes keep us informed how it comes out.

I dry hopped an IPA in the keg with centennial and left them in the keg. By the time I got to the bottom it had a real pronounced grapefruit taste.