Hello all!
I'm newish to the forum but I thought I would share my experiments in the Shandy realm due to the fact that it was extremely difficult to find information on brewing the type of shandy I wanted. The following is information for an AG recipe that was kegged. If you are doing extract and/ or bottling you can ask questions but I guarantee I'm not the guy to be answering your question but I will help any way I can.
So here were some of my goals from the onset of the experiment. I wanted a fairly alcoholic beverage something in the 5-6% ABV range. I also wanted an unabashedly lemon shandy, not a week vaguely lemon/ citric beer. A true shandy is 1/2 and 1/2 lemonade and I wanted that flavor mixed with the beer. I also did not want to use koolaid in my beer. Something about spending a bunch of time 'crafting' a beer then mixing it with koolaid? No, just no. I wanted to juice my own lemons and use that for the beer.
I also wanted this premixed on draft. A large portion of the comments on other shandy threads is someone saying "just mix it in the glass.... yada yada" If that is what you want to do, great, its just not what I was looking for.
I started my experiments mixing a fresh lemonade with a honey wheat I had on draft. I'm on my 6th iteration of the honey wheat (It's my wife's favorite type of beer and the local brew pub that sells it upset me, I won't give them my business anymore and my beer kicks the tail of there beer anyways) and what I found is that my honey wheat beer wasn't the perfect base. The beer just didn't hold up to the sourness of fresh lemons. I decided to add 2 lbs of Crystal 20L to the recipe.
Fermentables:
4.5 lbs of American Wheat
5 lbs of 2 Row
2 lbs of Crystal 20L
2 lbs of honey added at flame out
Mash temp- 150
Fly sparge for 60 min
5.75 gallon pre-boil volume
90 Min boil with a 60 min hop addition of 1 oz of Haullertau
Whirlflock w/ 10 min left of boil
5 gallons collected in fermenter
Oxygenated from a stone and added a rehydrated package of dry yeast, Danstar Munich Heffe yeast, fermented 2 weeks at 65 degrees F and cold crashed.
Once the base was ready to go I made the "lemonade." Since I knew I wanted a fairly alcoholic beverage I didn't want to make a "real" lemonade. My idea was to make a concentrated version of the lemonade and the base beer would make up for some of the water. I had two other concerns about adding the lemonade to the base. The first was in reading some of the other shandy threads I did't want the lemonade to separate from the base in the keg. It seems others had problems when adding sugar/ koolaid to cold beer a lot of the product dropped out of suspension and formed a "trub" on the bottom of the keg. The other concern I had was in the wild yeasties that certainly existed on the lemons. I decided that I would make my "concentrate" in a gallon of boiling water. The thought was the heat would sanitize the bacteria and increase the solubility of the solution for the sugar to dissolve. Also my thought was by using a gallon of water my water based lemonade and the base which was mostly water would mix and diffuse better. Here is the recipe of my lemon based concentrate:
10 lbs of lemons which yielded just over 6.5 cups of juice.
5 cups of sugar
1 gallon of water.
I boiled the water, mixed the ingredients and cooled in an ice bath.
I then racked my beer into a bottling bucket and mixed in 1/4 teaspoon of potassium metabisulfate. I don't know what the potential for continued fermentation is but I figured this couldn't hurt.
The recipe turned out great. My only change I am going to make next time is that I am going to try and filter the lemon juice before making the lemonade. The first 5-6 pulls off the keg had a significant amount of pulp that had settled. This caused a significant increase in the lemon flavor. After the pulp was out from the bottom of the keg it was smooth sailing.
Any comments in regards to some of my reasoning are much appreciated as well as suggestions for the next time I brew this. I hope it was helpful!
I'm newish to the forum but I thought I would share my experiments in the Shandy realm due to the fact that it was extremely difficult to find information on brewing the type of shandy I wanted. The following is information for an AG recipe that was kegged. If you are doing extract and/ or bottling you can ask questions but I guarantee I'm not the guy to be answering your question but I will help any way I can.
So here were some of my goals from the onset of the experiment. I wanted a fairly alcoholic beverage something in the 5-6% ABV range. I also wanted an unabashedly lemon shandy, not a week vaguely lemon/ citric beer. A true shandy is 1/2 and 1/2 lemonade and I wanted that flavor mixed with the beer. I also did not want to use koolaid in my beer. Something about spending a bunch of time 'crafting' a beer then mixing it with koolaid? No, just no. I wanted to juice my own lemons and use that for the beer.
I also wanted this premixed on draft. A large portion of the comments on other shandy threads is someone saying "just mix it in the glass.... yada yada" If that is what you want to do, great, its just not what I was looking for.
I started my experiments mixing a fresh lemonade with a honey wheat I had on draft. I'm on my 6th iteration of the honey wheat (It's my wife's favorite type of beer and the local brew pub that sells it upset me, I won't give them my business anymore and my beer kicks the tail of there beer anyways) and what I found is that my honey wheat beer wasn't the perfect base. The beer just didn't hold up to the sourness of fresh lemons. I decided to add 2 lbs of Crystal 20L to the recipe.
Fermentables:
4.5 lbs of American Wheat
5 lbs of 2 Row
2 lbs of Crystal 20L
2 lbs of honey added at flame out
Mash temp- 150
Fly sparge for 60 min
5.75 gallon pre-boil volume
90 Min boil with a 60 min hop addition of 1 oz of Haullertau
Whirlflock w/ 10 min left of boil
5 gallons collected in fermenter
Oxygenated from a stone and added a rehydrated package of dry yeast, Danstar Munich Heffe yeast, fermented 2 weeks at 65 degrees F and cold crashed.
Once the base was ready to go I made the "lemonade." Since I knew I wanted a fairly alcoholic beverage I didn't want to make a "real" lemonade. My idea was to make a concentrated version of the lemonade and the base beer would make up for some of the water. I had two other concerns about adding the lemonade to the base. The first was in reading some of the other shandy threads I did't want the lemonade to separate from the base in the keg. It seems others had problems when adding sugar/ koolaid to cold beer a lot of the product dropped out of suspension and formed a "trub" on the bottom of the keg. The other concern I had was in the wild yeasties that certainly existed on the lemons. I decided that I would make my "concentrate" in a gallon of boiling water. The thought was the heat would sanitize the bacteria and increase the solubility of the solution for the sugar to dissolve. Also my thought was by using a gallon of water my water based lemonade and the base which was mostly water would mix and diffuse better. Here is the recipe of my lemon based concentrate:
10 lbs of lemons which yielded just over 6.5 cups of juice.
5 cups of sugar
1 gallon of water.
I boiled the water, mixed the ingredients and cooled in an ice bath.
I then racked my beer into a bottling bucket and mixed in 1/4 teaspoon of potassium metabisulfate. I don't know what the potential for continued fermentation is but I figured this couldn't hurt.
The recipe turned out great. My only change I am going to make next time is that I am going to try and filter the lemon juice before making the lemonade. The first 5-6 pulls off the keg had a significant amount of pulp that had settled. This caused a significant increase in the lemon flavor. After the pulp was out from the bottom of the keg it was smooth sailing.
Any comments in regards to some of my reasoning are much appreciated as well as suggestions for the next time I brew this. I hope it was helpful!
