A couple a weeks ago we got a funny request from one of Dos Amigos' Homebrewing staff, his girlfriend and sister will both celebrate their birthday in October and he wanted to present them with the gift of beer!
Of course, we couldn't say no to Randall nor to the request of brewing!
The challenge was simple, we needed to brew a beer mild enough to match the average Costa Rican palate, with enough flavor to differentiate from local beer and that expressed love!
First of all, we needed some references, local beer bitterness averages around 20 IBU, so we knew we required a beer near or below the 20 IBU.
We also wanted to add some extra flavor but avoid adding fruit to it, honestly, we haven´t mastered that type of brewing.... yet!
After several discussion and proposal, we decided to brew a wheat beer with orange! According to several internet forums, coriander seed are also nice to have and we decided to add another secret ingredient (you need to visit us and share a beer with us to find it out)!
And so, our brewing started!
These are the main ingredientes, we followed a typical Wheat beer recipe for our grain bill
It's all about the technique! Doesn't matter if you are alone or you have an extra hand there is no excuse for not brewing!
Low and slow will do the trick on this one, it finally set at 67°
When making homebrew, have a homebrew! Thanks Charlie (any beer lover know who Charlie P. is!) for this quote it definitelly changed my life!
After 1 hour mashing, we got nice wort ready for vorlauf and sparge!
First of 6 required, if you homebrew... you know what I mean! :-)
Time to collect the wort!
Personally... I love the color! I believe we are going to be a bit darker than a blond ale but it is still golden and beautiful!
Houston, rolling boil achieved! The hot break is over and it is time to add our hops, in this particular brew, we only used 1oz of cascade @60min and tha was it... there wasn't much action in this one! Except for the last 5min when the orange peel and coriander was added!
After chilling it, it was time to move it to the fermenter, as you might have notice in previous post, this is prefered way to move the beer from the pot to the fermenter, we use the autosiphon but, in this case, due to the amount of orange peel, we ended dumping it in the strainer!
Once done we added our yeast and let it rest, in our future post, we'll let you know how it turn out!
Prost!
Adrian
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