I made this beer today, 3/27. I tried to talk to everyone I could who had made something similar and get as much information off the interboobs as I possibly could. Again, the numbers seemed to be all over the place. Someone suggested using 2 ounces of the grains of paradise which is A LOT. Someone else said they used 2 grams which was a bit much but as we discussed it we found that the 2 grams was used in just 3.5 gallons of beer so I took that into consideration. Someone suggested using 2 ounces of lemon zest… again, a lot. Do you know how many lemons you would need to zest to get 2 ounces? I zested three lemons that I thought were good-sized, not giant by any stretch but not tiny either. I made sure not to get any of the bitter pith, just the zest. I got around .75 oz from the three lemons and decided to go with that and if I thought the beer needed more, I could add it to secondary. I also went with 1.8 grams of grains of paradise crushed and added with the lemon zest at flameout and allowed to steep for 15 minutes with the lid on. So the final recipe went like this:
[b]Mayfair Court Summer Ale
4.25 lbs Weyermann Pilsner Malt
4.00 lbs White Wheat
1.25 lbs Weyermann Dark Munich (10°L)
8 ounces Carapils
1 oz Hallertau pellets 4.6% for 60
¾ oz Hallertau pellets 4.2% for 20
Wyeast 1056 American Ale yeast
1.8 grams crushed grains of paradise + zest of three lemons (about .75 ounces of zest) added at flameout and allowed to steep with the lid on for 15 mins
OG: 1.054, FG: 1.014, IBU: 25, SRM: 7, ABV: 5.2%[/b]
The garage ended up smelling like Lemon Pledge. I think the heat and the scrubbing effects of primary will “dull” the lemon a little bit and make it so that it’s not “fresh-tasting” like it would be if you squeezed a lemon into a freshly-tapped glass of the beer. I did not sample the wort to test the level of grains of paradise but as I look back at the three pints I recently drank of the commercial version, the flavors of lemon and GOP were not up front at all. With that in mind (and with the fear of making a lemon-pepper bomb), I dialed it down thinking that I would rather err on the side of “mildly spicy/citrusy blonde ale”. I will check it from primary to secondary and if I think it needs more of anything, I’ll update this thread. Cheers Beerheads.
