Blue Moon Clone Brew Day

So far in our brewing we haven't been very experimental.  We put some chocolate in a bock last year and that was about it.  The rest of the time we've stuck to the kit recipe and hoped for the best.  However, our last brew day was a new day for minor experimentation - we decided to make a blue moon clone using a Belgian wheat ale extract kit as a base.

Basically all we added into the kit was some crushed coriander and some orange zest.  Coriander is pretty cool.  Neither Mike nor I had ever crushed coriander before so we were unaware of the transformation of the scent of the spice.  In the intact state the pellets smelled very similar to cumin.  However, after crushing it the fragrance shifted from savory to a floral bouquet.  It was awesome and the new scent seemed perfect for the beer.

We love smelling the different ingredients so this shift was really cool.  One of our favorite parts of brewing is breaking out the hops and smelling it.  This batch hardly had any hops but the small packet of Willamette still smelled great.

Of course all brew days require that we drink some home brew so we busted out a few different bottles.  I'm not even sure what this one was but it has a nice color and head to it.