Brewing with citrus?

[lowend]

I personally love citrus flavor and I really want to use more of it in my beer. Is there a right way to use lime/lemon/grapefruit juice in the brewing process? I'm thinking of doing a lime cider and I'm really not sure how to go about doing that. Any advice would be helpful.

 

[mrtrav]

Any reason why you don't want to use hops to get this flavor/aroma?

 

[lowend]

Any reason why you don't want to use hops to get this flavor/aroma?

No reason, but I just don't know any hops that would give as much citrus flavor as I'm looking for.

 

[JesseRC]

Cascades produce a really nice citrus grapefruit flavor. Pickup a Sierra Neveda Pale Ale and see for yourself. If you're gonna add citrus, I would only add the zest, only the outer not the white part.

 

[Edcculus]

I personally love citrus flavor and I really want to use more of it in my beer. Is there a right way to use lime/lemon/grapefruit juice in the brewing process? I'm thinking of doing a lime cider and I'm really not sure how to go about doing that. Any advice would be helpful.

Any type of citrus zest will get you the flavors you are looking for.

 

[dogwielder]

Coriander will give you kind of a lemony aroma, too.

 

[LibertyBrewer]

There was a thread going around on here early this summer about hard lemonade. Maybe you should try making some.

 

[ldgenius2000]

Cardamon works great as far as spices go and the citra hop has a great sort of citrus fruit cocktail thing going on when used as a flavoring hop. So far as juice goes, I would worry about too much acidity being introduced with just straight juice into your beer.

 

[brrman]

I made a mandarin stout with mandarin zest and it turned out nice... If it were a lighter beer it would have been really citrusy.

 

[heywolfie1015]

You might want to try a good Belgian wit recipe and up the amount of orange peel additions. I've also read on HBT of people substituting grapefruit rind in addition to increasing the amount.

Just fair warning, I made 5 gallons of wit about two months ago and included, respectively, .5 oz of bitter orange peel and coriander. It has a nice citrus edge to it, but just on the edge of too much. I'd be careful with adding too much citrus to a brew because it might take over the entire thing.

(Of course, if that's your intent, go for it.)

 

[spaceboi13]

I made a mandarin stout with mandarin zest and it turned out nice... If it were a lighter beer it would have been really citrusy.

That sounds fantastic

 

[mc_eric]

I've used lemon and lime zest in a rice ale before, turned out really nice. Kind of covered up the hop flavor/aroma, but I think I only used 1 oz of hops over the last 15 min. of the boil. I used zest from 3 medium-sized limes and 1 big lemon.