The recipe that I’ve had the most success with and probably the most enjoyable is Grapefruit Soda.
I’ve been working on a few more recipes and I have to say the best recipes are sometimes the simplest. In that post I covered a little bit about the history of soda and I added a ginger soda recipe. If you are a regular reader you may remember that a little while back I discussed craft soda. It’s on my list of beers to brew again and tweak.Today I want to post a different recipe, instead of the usual beer I want to return to making soda. The more I drink of this beer, the more I like it. I think a combination of juice at the end of the boil and grapefruit zest in the fermenter after fermentation might be the ticket to improve the beer.
That beer brought more grapefruit aroma to the party. I have since tasted an IPA from homebrewer Jamie Conway that featured dried grapefruit peel that had been soaked in vodka before being added in the secondary with dry hops. If I were to brew it again, I’d probably use more of the Challenger or just a higher alpha hop for bittering. However, after bottle conditioning brought up the carbonation level, the bite increased a bit. The Challenger hops I used had an alpha acid level of 6.8%. Initially, I thought the bitterness of the hops could have been more up front. It is juicy, but not to the point of being too sweet.
I’m really happy with the grapefruit flavor of this beer. The beer finished at 1.008, giving me an ABV of 5.2%. I collected a bit more wort than expected from my electric Brew in a Bag system, so six gallons (22.7 liters) went into the fermenter at 1.047. Fermentation was with a packet of Safale US 05. Also at flameout, I added a quart (about a liter) of organic, pasteurized grapefruit juice with no preservatives that I had frozen in a freezer bag. I repeated those two hop additions at flameout. Five minutes before flameout, I added an ounce (28 g) Amarillo and an ounce (28 g) Mosaic pellets. For bittering, I used 1 oz (28 g) UK Challenger for 60 minutes. The grain bill for the recipe is simple: 10 lbs (4.5 kg) American two-row and 8 oz (226 g) 60L crystal. So, if you are taking medicine on a regular basis, check with your doctor to see if it’s okay to drink grapefruit beverages. It must be said that grapefruit interferes with certain medications. The technique worked well for my saison, so I decided to adopt it for my grapefruit pale ale. Brook and David froze fruit juice in plastic bags and added it to the end of the boil to help jump start the chilling process. This was inspired by an interview with homebrewers Brook Baber and David Bauter on Basic Brewing Radio about their method of brewing graf, a fictional beverage envisioned by Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” series. Back in 2014, I brewed a pineapple saison using a quart of frozen pineapple juice added at the end of the boil. In order to chase that fruit character, I decided to play with some juice.Īs Chris noted in an earlier story on brewing fruit beers, you can use peel, flesh, juice or extract from fruit to achieve a fruity flavor. I remember brewing my first pale ale with Amarillo back in the day, and I was amazed by the amount of grapefruit flavor and aroma coming out of my pint glass. One thing that attracts me to “West Coast” pale ales and IPAs is the citrus character of their hops. Grapefruit juice adds some tasty citrus character