Orange zest: Dried Sweet / Dried Bitter / Fresh

[BenTheBrewer]

It's that time again boys and girls... Time for the easy drinking spring time hefeweizens.

I would like to make an American Hefe with the unoriginal ingredients Orange Zest and possibly Corriander. I plan on brewing a 5 gal batch and using American Hefe yeast to cut out on a ton of esters. But I've never used Zest before. With the lack of the german yeast flavor, will one zest be more overpowering than another? I would like a light to moderate orange flavor. I'd imagine people will want an orange in it anyways (out of trendy habit!), but i'd like to avoid the need for them. Any ideas? Also how potient is corriander? 1/2 oz too much at 15 mins?

Thanks in advance

[spiderwrangler]

Sounds like you are heading towards Wit territory. Last 'wit' I had used .2 oz of coriander at 15, and .2 at 1 min. Also had Grains of paradise and citrus zest.

[Whitebeard_Brewer]

+1 on the Wit.....

I also brewed a hefe 2 years back, and used Sorachi Ace hops, gave it a beautiful lemony zing to it.

[spiderwrangler]

The zest I used was a mixture of orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit, all fresh. Lime was a bitch to zest. Next time I'd likely take a simpler approach.

[pizzle]

i've never like the dried bitter orange peel, it seems to be 90% white pith and seemed to only add bitterness to my wits. Nowadays i use only fresh peel of various citrus...

[spiderwrangler]

I haven't used dry, but would proably still opt for fresh. As far as the coriander, to some degree it depends on how fine it is. I just cracked mine, didn't turn it to a powder and it seemed fine.