Here is an update. I bottled this about a week ago. It's nice and dry, but HOT from the ginger. It's kind of too orange forward as well. I wish I had used about half of the orange peel, but still delicious! Overall, I'm pleased as this was the first thing I ever brewed.
Ginger is strange old stuff.......
You can use "too much" and seeming you don't get enough flavour from it. You can use just a little and it seems to be hot as hell....
I wish there was as much info/guidance for its use or extracting the flavour as there is for chilli pepper/capsaicin......
With your "orange forward" thing, presumably you used whole orange then ?
Having done various experiments, pithy bitterness is one of the reasons I find JAO to be a poor dry recipe - and I suspect other orange recipes where the whole fruit has been used. Its entirely possible that it needs to be a bit sweeter, but orange pith taste is masked by lots of sweetness in the JAO recipe (often at the 1.025 sort of area), and extra sugar/sweetness brings out the heat/warmth of ginger flavour......
i.e. if you don't want that as a "main" focus in the flavour, then it seems that you need to "zest" the orange first as that is the part that contains the oils, aromatics and other VOC's and then either juice it or segment it and use the flesh/juice and zest.......
Equally, maybe its one of those combo's that need long aging ? Cos, given the figures you quote, 1.135 to 0.990, dunno what yeast you used but most aren't capable of that - mind that 133 point drop equates to 18% ABV so while there's some variability with honey musts when considering the publish numbers for many yeast (plus a very few yeasts capable of more than that), I'd have just left it aging for a couple of years.......
besides that, it sounds like a flavour combo I could drink to excess
and it looks an excellent colour........
