Very Appealing...

Don’t let anyone tell you that just because a beer is refreshingly easy to drink it’s not deceptively difficult to make. Our White Ale is just that! It’s all about balance and when our take on a traditional Belgian wheat beer involves oats, juniper berries, spices, and citrus peel (just to mention a few) things get a little bit interesting. In fact, just getting great citrus peel is challenge enough.

The peel we would love is Curacao Orange – it’s grown in the Caribbean and they’ve been importing into Belgium forever. On our little island though, we can’t get stuff in because they want to protect our borders from diseases and pests. We thought we'd try our luck anyway and did order some in once but it got burnt when it arrived at customs! Next time you're watching Border Patrol on TV and there's a White Rabbit brewer running away from the camera you'll know why...

Turns out the only way we could get it was if they cooked it at 70 degrees for 8 hours; we're thinking we’ve lost all the goodness at that point. There was a point where we said “stuff it” and decided to get the cooked peel anyway, just to try, but the suppliers wouldn’t send it to us unless we ordered a tonne! We even looked at dehydrating our own orange but that is serious hard work.

As a result of all that, we've been spending much more time than usual hanging about in orange orchards on our eternal quest to make the best beer possible. Every so often you uncover a diamond in the rough and we reckon we've hit the jackpot with some ‘rough skinned’ Seville peel from Mildura we've just found. Now it's time to get back to the brewery and experiment...