Here We Are Zests Its Own Orange Peel, Then Conditions the Can

Dried orange peel is the one witbier ingredient nobody makes themselves. Green Cheek zests and dries California oranges in house, and this time left the yeast in the can to finish the carbonation.

• Style: Belgian-Style White Ale
• Release Date: 2026-09-11
• ABV: 5.0%
• Green Cheek Beer Company (Orange, CA)

Dried orange peel is the one witbier ingredient almost nobody makes themselves. It arrives in a bag, usually Curacao peel from a bitter orange, and it has been standard for the style long enough that most brewers never think about it.

Green Cheek Beer Company makes its own. For Here We Are, back today at 5.0 percent, the brewery zests locally grown California oranges, dries the peel in house, and adds it alongside fresh-ground coriander.

That substitution is not cosmetic. Curacao peel comes from a bitter orange and brings a dry, faintly medicinal edge that sits underneath the coriander rather than beside it. A California sweet orange is a different fruit - rounder, more perfumed, far less bitter. Swapping one for the other moves the seasoning closer to the actual fruit and away from the dried-spice register the style usually lives in. It is also, straightforwardly, a great deal more work.

Underneath the seasoning is raw wheat, pilsner malt and old-fashioned oats, hopped with noble varieties and fermented with a Belgian strain the brewery credits for pear and nutmeg. The raw wheat is the load-bearing part. Unmalted and unkilned, it carries protein and starch that give witbier both its haze and the soft body the style is known for.

The genuinely new thing this time is the carbonation. Green Cheek can conditioned the beer, meaning it was packaged with enough fermentable sugar and live yeast to run a small second fermentation inside each can instead of being force carbonated from a tank.

Bottle conditioning has been ordinary in Belgium for centuries. Doing it in a can is much less common. It asks more of the packaging line and more of the yeast, and it is not something a brewery takes on for the sake of a line in a newsletter. The payoff is a finer, more persistent bead and a little more yeast character left in the glass. For a style meant to arrive soft and lightly spiced, that is a sensible place to spend the effort.

Green Cheek's tasting notes run juicy pear, nutmeg, fruit loops and California oranges. The coriander-and-orange pairing against a pear-and-nutmeg yeast would sit well next to something salty and rich - a soft washed-rind cheese, or a pot of mussels, which is the traditional Belgian answer and has not stopped being a good one.

Four-packs are 15 dollars. Here We Are is available now at Green Cheek's taprooms.