Orange peel

[Redtab78]

Question about adding orange peel to wheat beer. Can I just peel an orange that I would eat regularly at home and add the whole peel to my wort at the last 15 min?

I see a lot of uses for bitter and sweet, and I would assume by my reading, one is the orange part on the outside, while one is the white part on the inside, but some of the amount used in some is close to .18oz, which is not very much actually...so I was curious if anyone has just added a whole peel before, and if so, what is the results.

 

[FloppyKnockers]

Yes and no. Yes, you can use an orange like the kind you would eat at home. No, you cannot just use the whole peel. You're going to want to zest the orange to get just the orange part. The white part of the peel, called the albedo, is bitter and disgusting.

 

[lolcats]

Yes you can

Do this without taking the white part

 

[vNmd]

I have made a shandy a couple of times and done the zesting of actual oranges & lemons, but I do a Blue Moon clone quite a bit and buy it in bottles and bags which is a lot easier, less messy, and easier to calculate amounts.

 

[unionrdr]

Yeah, only the colored part od citrus has the flavor/aromatic oils in it. The white pith is not just bitter, but in a bad way. It has that bitter, pithy, taste that seems like it just soaks into your mouth to me. Yuk. But I was just thinking in a wheat ale, meyer lemon zest would be darn goo with it's slight orange flavor that really adds to the lemon flavor!

 

[Canuck137]

I often do this... usually I just buy it bc it's $2.50 for an ounce of it... but I have peeled a whole orange before and used it. Just watch out for the pith!

 

[filthyastronaut]

Did an IPA with orange and tangerine zest recently, used 2 each, zested them with a simple vegetable peeler, with a 5 min. boil addition. Plenty of citrus flavor. For a wheat I would maybe just do 2 medium sized oranges. If there isn't much in the way of malt and hop flavor to fight with it, it should be fairly pronounced.

 

[ShineonCrazyDiamond]

Here's a good recepie I just finished and is carbing now. Note that the Centennial hop is actually the (new?) German citrus hop, Mandarina Bavaria that I used for a little aroma. It wasn't in my beer program. Figured it kept with the style as a German hop. I suppose you could drop the honey malt and make it legal-ish? Lol.

Anyways, I just zested 4-5 oranges, only the orange part like others above have stated.

Good luck!

View attachment HoneyOrangeWiezenbach-2016-04-24_10-49-19.xml

 

[DromJohn]

Did someone above make a pithy statement that pith had a pithy taste?

No pith with the zest of two navel oranges in my Cuvée Des Trolls.

 

[Redtab78]

I ended up zesting a blood orange and a cara-cara orange, combined with about .40 Oz of cracked coriander seed, smelled amazing all combined in my mesh bag...I'll report back in about 4 weeks of how it went!!