Cloning Lost Coast Tangerine Wheat - continued

Hi everyone,

On my last post I mentioned that I was attempting to clone Lost Coast's Tangerine Wheat Beer. Well...on August 7th, the experiment was bottled. As I had mentioned before I was going to add different quantities of Tangerine Oil Extract to different bottles to see if I can come up with a close match for one of my favorite beers. Here are the particulars of the bottling process...

Ending SG (specific gravity) was measured at 1.009 so I made a 1/4 cup sugar solution(1 cup water, 1/4 cup sugar, 2oz citric acid and heated to 190F for 5 min) and racked the beer from it's secondary into a bottling carboy containing the sugar solution. I separated the beer into 5x1-gal batches to contain different levels of tangerine oil extract addition. The first gallon I did not add any tangerine extract. I wanted to see how the beer would taste with the original additions of tangerine rind and juice. The beer smells and tastes good but a few weeks in the bottle will make a difference.

The second gallon I added 1tsp of the extract and it smelled really nice but my first thoughts was it was to much extract. It was quite a bit more pungent than the commercial product. I went ahead and left it that way and produced 9 bottles. Each bottle was labeled to indicate the 1tbs extract per gal. On the third gallon I decided to cut back on the extract and only added 1/2tsp to the gallon. The aroma was not as pungent and seemed quite pleasant. This might be the one...but I kept going.

On the 4th and 5th gallon I increased the amount of extract to 1.5tsp and 2tsp respectively. The plan is to keep the beer at room temperature for 3 weeks before the taste test. On Sept 3 I will open one bottle from each batch and try them out. I am confident that one of these experimental batches will yield a close enough match.

More on this experiment later...

dB