planning a blood orange wheat: advice appreciated

[Neddy]

I'm planning on brewing a blood orange wheat soon and I'm looking for a little advice. I'm looking for a nice pink colored beer with a hint of orange flavor. I'm planning of using the juice from blood oranges and the zest from several types of oranges.

I'm look for advice on the following:

1. approx how much fresh squeezed blood orange juice to add a nice pink color
2. When should I add the juice? end of boil, once chilled, to a secondary (which I don't normally do for my wheat beer)
3. How much orange flavor can I expect from the juice once its fermented? I'm trying to gauge how much zest to put in at flame out so theres a hint of orange but not too much.

[scotchpine]

I think if you add the juice before fementation, the yeast will eat it all up since is mostly sugar and not leave you with much flavor. I did this with pineapple juice once and thats what happened. It dried the beer completely out and did not leave much flavor at all. I would say to wait till fermantation is done, then add it to secondary for a while. Maybe you could add it to bottleing bucket in place of priming sugar, I have'nt tried that yet. I have had some success steeping fruit in the cooling wort. I think that for these reasons it's most common to use the peels in the boil though, onbtaining the flavor by extracting the oils from them instead of introducing a lot more sugar.

[thatguy314]

Take a cue from the Jamil cider show. Ferment the juice in the 2' as low and low and slow as you can. It's simple sugar. It'll get done. At low temp it volatilize off the least amount of aromatics.

On a side note, please remember, not all blood oranges are the same. Some are very sour. Some are actually bitter. You'll want to know what oranges you're using before you brew so you can adjust the recipe accordingly.

[Neddy]

My thinking is that I'll use blood orange juice mostly for color and probably the last few mins of the boil, it doesn't bother me too much if I don't get much flavor/aroma from it. I'm trying to decide how much juice I'll need to turn the beer a bit of a pink color. I was thinking about buying several other varieties for oranges and using zest at knock out for the flavor and hopefully a little aroma. I brewed a Belgian wit a few months ago and used zest at knockout to get some flavor/aroma - I actually got a little more orange character than I was looking for in that recipe but it did have a nice orange flavor and detectable e aroma. Does that seem reasonable?

[thatguy314]

Sounds good to me. Actually better than the juice.

[dmtaylor]

See my response here.

http://forum.northernbrewer.com/viewtop ... 5&t=101759

[nikkormat]

I added ~2 lbs of pureed blood oranges to 2.5gal of a saison (in secondary). not a whole lot of flavor from it, and surprisingly the color doesn't get pink. it's more like a pinkish copper

this guy did a blood orange hef though:
http://beer47.com/2009/03/homebrewing-b ... efeweizen/

[Cody]

I'd imagine you'd be better off adding something much deeper red than you want to finish with, since it's going to be diluted quite a bit. For the color, at least.