Steeped specialty grains plus malt extract:
Sometimes homebrew recipes start out in one direction, then end up taking a different direction. This is one of those stories. I statarted out inspired by Mosher's (2004) Yellow Diamond Belgian Pale Ale. The competing intention though was to brew with what I have on hand, including a large amount of specialty grains that a friend gave to me. There's no Munich malt, but I had Caramunich. There's some aromatic malt, but not as much as the recipe needs. And on it goes, with hop substitutions and more. Tim Gunn used to say "make it work!" to contestants on Project Runway that were stretching to reach their goals. That seems like a fitting name for this effort.
The original recipe calls for the zest of one to two oranges. The zest of one orange is about 15 g. The present recipe used two oranges. This 30 g works out to about 1.6 g/l.
A technical note is that the percentages in Mosher's recipe have a typo. Belgian medium crystal malt is 0.5%, but probably should be 5%.
For Mosher's Yellow Diamond recipe, replace the malt lines (malt:) with ...
malt: Belgian pale ale malt, 40, 2.2, 83 malt: Belgian Munich malt, 30, 10, 74 malt: Belgian aromatic Malt, 10, 23, 78 malt: Belgian medium crystal malt, 5, 60, 74
Replace the hop lines (hop:) with...
hop: Northern brewer, 65, 6.5, 90 hop: Saaz, 20, 3, 90 hop: Saaz, 15, 3, 15
I felt like the piloncillo sugar didn't add anything particularly interesting. Dissolving this sugar was slow - it's rock hard. It could be replaced by another sugar.
Randy Mosher's Yellow Diamond Belgian Pale Ale
Mosher, R. (2004). Radical Brewing, Brewer's Publications, p. 117.