Fresh Juice in an IPA

Fresh juice probably wont work at bottling, it will create bottle bombs. Cold crashing wont kill the yeast and any in suspension will ferment the sugars in the juice.

Edit: And if you do kill the yeast off in another fashion then you will just have a batch of flat bottles as the yeast will not ferment the priming sugar.

 

Forget about the juice and make a citrus zest extract with neutral spirits. Then add as much or as little of the extract to as many or as few of the bottles in your batch as you want come bottling time.

 

I don't know proportions, but Craftsman here in pasadena uses a whole orange slurry they make in their Orange Grove Pale Ale. It's pretty tasty, but I think it also goes in at the end of boil.

I'll second the suggestion about using citrus zest in vodka. I've done this a few times with things like my Saison Guacamole and One Night In Tijuana. It works like a charm.

 

Do you add the zest to the whole batch or just individual bottles? And if so how much?

 

Be careful I've heard fruit juice ferments out nasty

 

Crooked stave adds whole citrus to their boil for st bretta. It tastes great. That being said I would wonder how much citrus is going to add to a hop bomb. I used the zest from 1 grapefruit, 2limes, 2lemons and 2oranges to a kolsch and got a hint of citrus through in the finished product. If this beer was halfway as hoppy as my usual ipa's there would be 0 citrus presence.

 

I usually add it to the keg (or bottling bucket) when zesting the whole batch. If you didn't want to zest the entire batch, you could just add drops directly to as many bottles as you want. You should experiment with the first one to find the right amount and then repeat process.

If I had to ball park it, I'd say put about 10 grams of citrus zest into about 1 - 1.25 fluid oz of neutral spirits for 5-15 days to make the extract. Then probably 1 ml per bottle (roughly 20 drops) would give you a strong citrus zest presence. Again this is just a guess. Try 10 drops in your first bottle (or 1 drop in say 1 fluid oz) and increase moving forward if it's not enough.

 

Exactly what do you mean by that statement?

Granted, fruit juice will thin the body of almost any base beer, but the type of fruit juice and the mash temp of the base beer will be significant variables. I will say, added juice to an IPA is almost never a good thing, IMHO.

 

Can you be a little more specific Koopa? Just kidding!!!! Thanks so much for the response.

 

i brewed a saison where i 'dry hopped' with the flesh of 2 grapefruits for about 5 days before bottling. it was really bright and grapefruit-y at first but faded really quickly.

 

I had a tangerine IPA from Petosi when I visited Wisconsin a few months ago... I thought it was great. I'm pretty sure they used tangerine juice to dilute the beer from 7.5% down to 7%

 

Just figure out how much sugar is in the juice, and use the appropriate amount to carbonate your beer (you want somewhere in the range of 2-2.5 g sugar per 12 oz bottle). If you're using a packaged juice, there will probably be nutritional info that lists the amount of sugar per serving, or at least the calories from sugar per serving (4 or 5 calories per g of sugar-look it up). I would just try it out on a few bottles to see how well it works. My guess is you'll add 10-15 ml of juice per bottle.

 

The 'flesh' (pulp?) squeezed dry? Interesting way to do that.

 

Reviving this thread because I'm interested in making a grapefruit IPA.

I did a lemon lime hefe with 4 limes worth of zest at 10 min in the boil, and then I added a bottle of simply lime about 24 hours into fermentation. I can't say whether the zest or juice contributed more, but the lime character really came through well and the beer was delicious.

I'm thinking about trying the same thing with grapefruit zest/simply grapefruit in an IPA. Anyone have luck with other methods? How about other juices like passion fruit or guava nectar?