Breakfast Beer Competition Entry
Sooo, you join a homebrewing club, and you get set a daft challenge right? It's rule number 3 I believe - you know what rule number 1 and 2 are.
Our daft challenge? To make a breakfast beer utilising an ingredient drawn at random, ranging from Bacon to Weetabix to Tea and the ingredient I got allocated, Orange Juice.
I made my 'Orange Juice' beer last weekend, whilst mashing an all-grain beer.
First the research, all several minutes of it.
A breakfast beer is not really a style as far as I can tell, nor is it defined by the inclusion of one or more ingredients you might associate with breakfast. No. Based on the limited references I could be bothered to look at, it's a beer consumed at breakfast time and, if there is a defining characteristic, it's generally of a lower ABV. Very low infact.
Next, ingredient selection. Turns out the general consensus is that Orange Juice is rank when fermented. Many of the anecdotes I found related to it being fermented by wild yeasts to be fair, but, decision made, no orange juice is going near this beer.
So my challenge is to make a low ABV beer that bears some resemblance to Orange Juice without using Orange Juice.
This was my recipe, for a 23 (+ 1.5*) litre batch.
1.5kg can Coopers Light Malt Extract 400g brewing sugar 200g light brown sugar
Boil/Hop schedule 40 minute boil. 20g Amarillo - 40 mins 20g Amarillo - 10 mins 1 teaspoon protofloc - 10 mins 10g Corriander seeds aka a slack handful - 5 mins
The boiled wort was then immediately moved to a fermenter where I added a sterlised hop bag containing 60g of Amarillo with another slack handful of corriander seeds.
*I also added 1.5 litres of wort that I couldn't fit in the all-grain boil. This was a combination of pale, medium crystal and chocolate malt. Technically this hadn't been boiled but the sparge temps reached 80c so I decided to chance it. Shame to waste it after all.
I then sealed the fermenter and left it to cool and the hops to steep over several hours whilst I cracked on with the all-grain beer. Once at 30c I removed the hop bag and added a US05 yeast starter.
OG adjusted for temperature was 1029 so I'll certainly have fulfilled my lower ABV criterion, it should come in around 2.5%.
The only decision left to be made is whether or not to add some orange peel as it nears the end of it's primary fermentation.
I'll have a sample and then decide on that.