I'm brewing tonight and I'm using lemon peel for a wheat beer. First time using additional ingredients... Should I add it to the boil, or should I add it once I'm moving to the fermenter? Sorry if this is a total no0b question. Thanks and cheers! Evan
Add to the boil. Do it late, I normally do mine inside of 10 minutes. Infact, I do a wheat that has lemon peel and do it at 7 minutes. But boil it.. Don't put it in the fermenter, won't really do much. If you boil it too long, you boil it all away, so there's a happy spot.
I tried another approach. Puree the lemon peel, boil for 20 minutes, then dump the resulting water and lemon peels into secondary after fermentation is done. Use 1/2 a lemon peel, i.e. sparingly, with this technique or else it will overpower your beer. This achieves two things. 1) Since fermentation is done, you won't have CO2 blowing off your aroma from the beer. If you put it in even at the end of the boil, the CO2 of the fermentation will remove a good deal of aroma and that's half what I think you're looking for. 2) The water from your mini boil really adds to the flavor, since has very little in the way of starches for the yeast to munch on. The result is an explosion of flavor of lemons in your beer. Also, I tried lemon and lime peels together and got a 7-up/Sprite flavor minus the artificial cloying sweetness of the soda, yet tasted fresh like a biting into a lemon/lime minus the sourness of the pulp.
