Over the next 48 hours, I constantly monitored how the flavor was progressing to ensure that we didn’t tread into that zone of punishing bitterness I was familiar with. This “zest method” is much farther down the brewing process than what I’d done in my homebrewing days of tossing grapefruit into the boil. Fishing wire, while also an okay option, is round, which can lead to potential leaks and therefore contamination. Dental floss is the perfect item to use for this method since it is flat, easy to sanitize, and will allow a better seal on the tank. I hung the bag inside the tank and anchored it outside by using dental floss. Goes without saying: cleanliness is key.Īfter the bath, I transferred the peel into a sanitized mesh bag with a sanitized weight and threw the peels in the brite tank. You can use any flavorless ethanol 40 proof or more, but cheap vodka is a good solution (think HRD or McCormicks). My goal was to toss the peel after fermenting and cold crashing, so I gave the grapefruit peel a quick vodka bath by dipping it a few times to kill off the wild yeast that grows on fruit. To start, I peeled fifteen pounds of grapefruit which yielded about 1.25 pounds of peel, a slight disparity.
This time around, I opted to add just the grapefruit peel (zest) to the beer on the cold side of the process. I was searching for another way to incorporate that bitter, fruity grapefruit flavor and for the most recent version of this beer, I took a new approach that would hopefully provide that balance. This time I ended up with a very “juicy” beer well before it became a worldwide craze. But I was going for a west coast IPA, shooting for a balance of fruit and hops. On my second attempt, I just used the fruit during flameout in the boil (where you turn the heat off and simply let it sit). In my first attempt five years ago, I threw entire grapefruits (rind, peel, fruit, and all) into the boil at 30 minutes, which resulted in a punishingly bitter beer. Originally, I had done it in the boil with varying success. When you are adding any adjunct to a beer, there are many ways that you can go about it with varying results.
#PEEL GRAPEFRUIT METHOD HOW TO#
This is a recipe that I’ve tinkered with meticulously since my homebrewing days, figuring out how to add fruit naturally to beer to provide balance, which has given us the latest version, the Zest Friends Forever Grapefruit IPA. From throwing whole grapefruits into the boil to steeping the rind in the brite tank, the grapefruit-infused IPA on our Second Profession tap list has undergone many incarnations.
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