I just brewed a witbier. After tasting it out of the primary it doesn't quite have the taste I'm looking for. I'd like to add some orange and/or coriander to the secondary, but I'm not sure how long and how much of each would be within reason. I was thinking of adding about .5 oz of each, and leaving it in a hop bag for a few days. Does this sound acceptable?
1 Answer
I added 7g of bitter Orange peel and 7g of fresh cracked (not ground) coriander seed directly into a 25 Litre bucket after 4 days of fermenting a wheat beer. I left them in for 10 days. It seemed like everything precipitated with the yeast, although after pouring the beer off and mixing with priming sugar solution, I took the precaution of putting some nylon gauze over the end of the siphon tube to stop any large debris getting into the beer bottles.
0.5 oz is about 14 g so that may be a little high for 24ltr/5gals(?) with very fresh ingredients but is probably OK for shelf stored, "shop bought" stuff. My coriander seed was fresh from my garden and anything over 10g was too fully flavoured - although it reduced on long conditioning. IMHO the orange peel is not so critical and 14 g would not be "bad" but it would depend on the peel. It should be from a "sour" or bitter orange, "normal" sweet orange peel does not add half as much flavour (but can be used) so maybe 14g of that might be good to use.
Good luck!
