Salty Gose the Margarita

You see I have my own homebrew version of a gose that I created a few years back. It's called “Salty Gose the Margarita” and is meant to taste like, surprise surprise, a margarita. It's a loose association however and this is very much still a gose beer. I'm often asked for the recipe so I've posted it below. The key difference in this recipe versus a traditional gose recipe that that I add keylime zest and Tripel Sec.

Yes, Tripel Sec liqour.

It has a high sugar content so it's an excellent choice for priming sugar and also helps with the whole margarita thing. You might see that the recipe calls for one bottle and think I got lazy but I actually did the math to figure out how much sugar was in Tripel Sec and how much of it I need to carbonate my beer. Conveniently enough, one bottle is what it came out to.

This beer gets great feedback and never fails to raise a few eyebrows. I submitted it once to a competition where it got 43 points out of 50 from a Master BJCP judge.

Our homebrew club's version came out excellent as well. If I can get the recipe from those guys I will post it here. Until then, here's my recipe:

Salty Gose the Margarita
Stats
Original Gravity: 1.038
Final Gravity: 1.009
ABV: 3.8%
IBU: 4
Efficiency: 80%
Batch Size: 5 gal
Boil length: 90 minutes

Malt
3.50 lbs Belgian Pilsner Malt (46.1%)
3.50 lbs German Wheat Malt (46.1%)
0.60 lbs German Sauer (Acid) Malt (7.8%)

Hops
0.25 oz German Spalt Select (3.9% AA) – 60 min

Yeast
US-05 Safale dry yeast (any clean yeast will do)

Other
10 grams freshly crushed coriander seeds (important that they are freshly crushed seeds – no powder!)
15 grams Keylime zest
40 grams Kosher salt

Mash at 147°F for 60 minutes. Add the coriander, keylime zest, and salt with 10 minutes left in the boil.

Ferment until terminal gravity is reached and then give it just a few more days in the fermenter, but not any more.

Add 88% lactic acid to taste at bottling/kegging. I add 10 tsp for a 5 gallon batch. Naturally carbonate with 750ml of Triple Sec. Pour the Triple Sec and lactic acid into the bottling bucket or keg. Rack the beer on top until you reach 5 gallons on the bottling bucket or the top of the keg. Note that if you're kegging, you're not going to carbonate with CO2 for this. Just let it sit for two weeks (treat it like a giant bottle). Of course the Tripel Sec is optional. You can carb the traditionally way but I think this gives it a fun twist.