I was brewing a saison and I originally had a recipe saying to add .5 ounces of orange peel, but being dumb I accidentally added 5 ounces. It is a three gallon batch and the orange peel was added with 5 minutes left in the boil. I have never brewed with an orange peel before, so I'm just curious how will this affect my beer? Will it just have a really strong orange taste? Thanks
Will it be noticeable? Probably yes. Will it be stronger than what you intended? Again, probably yes. Will it be a bad thing? Who knows? You'll know it only after you taste it. You may have accidentally stumbled on something great! Or it may be a disaster! Either way, it's beer. Enjoy it and, more importantly, don't obsess over it. Fix it on the next try. Above all, RDWHAHB!
Bitter orange peel or sweet orange peel? The sweet might be imperceptible. regular orange peel also imperceptible...probably
I just bottled a 2.5 gallon pale ale with .5oz orange peel at the end of the boil, and about 2oz orange and tangelo peel in the dry hop, The orange flavor was very present, but not too much in my opinion.
If it was not something you bought from a homebrew shop (i.e. those bitter or sweet orange peel packages) and you zested the oranges by yourself, you will definitely be better off. Boiling for five minutes will have gotten rid of some flavor ... fermentation will get rid of some flavor ... You will probably still have a lot of perceptible orange, but it might not be as bad as you think. Report back when you're drinking it.
I zested them myself so hopefully it works out, I'll definitely comment back and let y'all know after I try it.
It will be fine...it will taste like a commercial craft product...think blue moon wheat or something like that. Hell depending on the orange it might be great...don't forget that the rind is quite bitter too.
Not to go off on a tangent, but I recall a few years ago when there would have been at least one, maybe more people who have would reflexively advised you to dump this beer and don't waste any more time or effort on this batch "but, hey, it's your money!" or words to that effect. Even before tasting it. It seems we've become a much more civil and, perhaps more importantly, more supportive bunch over the years. Maybe those were people who simply jumped on the homebrew bandwagon at that time and have since decided it's not for them. Just a casual observation.
So was it 5 ounces of orange peel or was it 5 ounces of zest? I'm thinking it would take a buttload* of oranges to get 5 ounces of zest. *Always weigh ingredients. Never measure by the buttload.
A buttload is simply too large a unit of measurement for 5 gallon home brews. I usually weigh mine in millibuttloads.
My guess is it could be a problem if you extract bitterness from the white pith. That type of bitterness is pretty off-putting, IMO -- YMMV. On the other hand, if you zested the orange carefully and avoided pith, that's probably better.
Just going to point out, if you do end up thinking there is too much orange character, then this is a classic example of a problem that can be solved by blending. Sometimes brewers make a bad batch and don't want to pour it down the drain, so they try blending it. That's usually a mistake because you're just throwing good beer after bad. But if the problem with the beer is simply that it has too much of an otherwise desirable flavor, blending is just what the doctor ordered. You could brew the same recipe, omitting orange peel entirely, and then blend the two.
I think you'll be fine. I brewed a "breakfast" beer a while back and had about 8oz of hand grated naval orange peel in the ferment. The ferment took away a LOT of the flavor. I re-made it and added the peel after the ferment and it was way more pronounced.
