IPA Recipe: Oranges, Grapefruit, Sea Salt

[taylorjohn11892]

Howdy,

I am a relatively new brewer with a 5 gal home kit (extract only) and am looking to create a recipe with the ingredients in the title but am not knowledgeable about achieving these desired tastes. I want it to be hoppy, with a mix of sour and sweet with a tad of saltiness. I want it to be a beer for the beach as I live on the Georgia coast. Can anyone help me with fruit infusion into the beer along with hop selection/schedule and type of extract to use? Thanks in advance!

 

[rhys333]

Are you looking to use actual oranges and grapefruit, or hops that taste and smell like them? As for the sea salt thing, you can add small amounts if you're building up a custom water profile from distilled or reverse osmosis water, but that's with all-grain and not extract. I'd be wary about adding salt to an extract batch because minerals will already be present, including the sodium and chloride you get with salt.

 

[taylorjohn11892]

What would you suggest? I would like to use actual fruit and compliment the fruit with the appropriate hops? I would like to achieve the sweet flavor from the oranges and extract, bitter from the grapefruit and hops to create like a sweet and sour IPA.

 

[rhys333]

You could try using a range of hops that have a grapefruit quality to them, perhaps just cascade and citra. A way to get orange notes in there would be to add some orange peel close to the end of the boil. I've never done this, but you could also try adding actual grapefruit juice after primary fermentation is complete. Since IPA's are consumed fresh and usually relatively high in alcohol, risk of infection from unpasteurized fruit juice should be low. If you were storing this beer for a long time (months to years), I wouldn't do this. You're brewing outside the box here, but no reason it shouldn't work.