It was satsuma season and my buddy Timmy had a few trees in his backyard, so he asked if I could brew him a satsuma beer. I wouldn’t say no to fresh satsumas, so I brewed a simple wheat ale, 10 gal batch, 70/30 2-row/wheat malt, OG 1.044, 20 IBU. I chilled to around 100 deg and pitched Sigmund’s Voss Kveik, and called Timmy to harvest some fresh satsuma that evening.
I decided to ferment in the brew kettle as I had bunch of satsuma peels to “dry hop” the beer, and I didn’t want to split the wort into 2x 7.8 gal plastic fermenter buckets. The krausen was already so thick (3 hrs post pitch) when Timmy brought me around 7 lbs of freshly harvested satsuma. I proceeded to wash them with tap water, then utilized a peeler to get the nice fresh peel. The kitchen smelled so great! It was pretty hard to get the peel as the skin was very thin. It took about 45 minutes to get a bowl full of peels. Then I squeezed the juice out of the remaining fruit (got about 2 quarts) and kept it for conditioning the beer post fermentation.
I did not weigh the peel, it must have been around 12 oz (a big bowl). I stuffed them in a nylon stocking and dropped them straight into the brewpot with 1 oz of Amarillo for some mysterious biotransformation action. 3 days into fermentation, I measured the FG, and it was done fermenting. I proceeded to kegging, gave the ball valve a little 90 deg turn to avoid racking in the trub/yeast cake, and dosed about 1/2 quart of juice into each keg (drank 1 quart of the juice because it was so sweet and fresh!). I put in a pressure gage to check for pressure increase. After a week, it only went up to 8 psi, so I had to force carbonate.
Final product was pretty good. Satsuma flavor was evident but the beer still taste like beer, not like satsuma juice. I am very pleased with the balance. If I want satsuma juice, I’ll juice a satsuma. But for fruit beer, I want the flavor to meld with the base beer in a subtle way. This beer is perfect for summer, but we don’t have fresh satsuma in the summer, so I’ll save this one for 70 deg New Orleans winter weather.
Salty Daddy Brewing 