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This Friday we will be making the very first brew of John’s Grocery Generations White Ale. Doug over at John’s has moved the brand to us after the closure of the Stone City Brewing Co. I’m very excited about making this beer, because it presents several new challenges for us.

First is the new ingredients of Coriander and Orange Peel. I have been spending the last weeks trying to find suppliers of these ingredients. In the process I have discovered that there are several different types of orange peel. First there is Curacao or bitter orange peel. This is from the Curacao bitter orange popularly grown in Seville Spain for use in marmalades. It has an intense orange aroma, but it also provides a vegetable bitterness that is supposedly important in balancing the tartness of this style of beer. Celis white or Hoegaarden would be the two best examples of beers using this peel.

The other peel is sweet orange peel. No one seems to be sure just exactly what type of orange this comes from. I guess it’s basically the same as the peel you find in supermarkets. Some homebrewers warn against using supermarket peels, as they can lead to of flavors. What am I to make of that? I’m not sure, maybe they aren’t peeling them right? I have heard that Blue Moon uses the peel from the Valencia orange, but suppliers I talk to don’t seem to know which type of orange the peel comes from. I’m getting several samples of sweet peel from different suppliers so I can compare price and quality. Thankfully the brewing community has come through for me and I have list of quality suppliers who fellow brewers have used to make medal winning beers!

Coriander is the last new ingredient. I was suprised to learn that this actually provides much of the citrus flavor of the beer. I had always assumed that it provided some sort of other flavor, like uh, coriander-flavor… But after reading up on it, I now know that it is actually the seed from the Cilantro plant. The seeds are quite spicy and citrus like. If we get whole coriander seeds, we are going to have to find some way of grinding them up. Using whole seeds would be preferable because that way the taste is fresher, like freshly ground coffee.

The recipe I have from jeff makes no mention of the addition times for all these spices, so I may have some fun figuring that out. Right now I’m thinking the later I add the spices, the better. I will probably add the majority of them into the whirlpool tank. That way much of the flavor will not evaporate off during the boil. We will have to see how the first batch tastes and go from there I guess.

We also will have a new yeast. For the first batch i’m going with white labs WLP400 belgium wit strain. This is not the same strain as was used by Stone City. Amazingly, they used the WLP300 strain which is the same strain we used in our Hefeweizen last year. There is huge difference between the way we handle our yeast and the way Stone City used to handle theirs. I think this was evident in the difference between our Hefewiessen and their wheat beer. As far as I can tell, the grain bills for those two beers was very similar, and they where both made with WLP300. But they tasted nothing alike. In particular, Stone City’s beer was much thinner and tarter than ours. Going with that evidence I am comfortable trying the WLP400 strain out. I want this beer to be tart, and Jeff said that when he tried this strain the Wit was way too tart.

The final challenge will be the used of flaked wheat in the brewhouse. We already have a tough time with our oatmeal stout and its flaked oats. Supposedly, flaked wheat is much easier to deal with. I sincerely hope so, or I will be having a long friday night here at the brewery!

I expect the first batch will be in the bottle as soon as the first week of January. Well, maybe. It will depend mostly on how long it takes the ATF to approve the new labels. We have to get new labels, because it must have our name on them as the brewer and not Stone City.