Today we're brewing our second lager, and are dedicating it to a good friend of ours who passed away. He loved his American lagers, and the very first beer we brewed over a year ago was an extract lager that we named after him, calling it Jim Style. Unfortunately, it was Kool-Aid beer - warm water, extract, sugar, dry yeast (the Cooper's kit). It wasn't all that great. Now we're doing it right, or at least better, with some all-grain action.
The recipe is based on the American Premium Lager recipe from
Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. As usual, we've upped the hops slightly to quench our hop teeth. The recipe only called for 1.25oz of German Hallertauer at 60 minutes, but since we have 2oz, we'll likely toss the rest in when there's around 20 minutes left in the boil.
Below we'll breakdown the brewing process:
5 days ago: Made a 2 liter starter of Wyeast 2007 Pilsen lager. Hopefully it's enough, our LHB only had one pack. It actively fermented the entire time (we added some yeast nutrient), so it should be good. We'd feel better using a starter with another smack pack (like last time, which worked very well), but oh well - we'll just have to see.
9:45am - Mash in. Hit our target temp of 152F (maybe 151F by the time we had the lid on, close enough). Now we wait 90 minutes.
11:15am - Only lost 1 degree during the mash - success! Now to set the grain bed and start sparging. We use the fly sparging method using a colander in the top of the tun (slowly sprinkling water over the entire grain bed). Our goal is to collect about 8 gallons, which will take quite a while.
12:15pm - Might be sparging a little too slow, not even halfway there, speeding it up a bit. Being very careful to not let the water level fall below the grain bed.
1:00pm - Sparge complete. Time to move outside to boil.
1:11pm - Shooting for a pre-boil gravity of 1.040, we got 1.039 - not too shabby.
1:22pm - We're boiling. Got to love the propane burner. When we were doing this on our stove-top it would take almost 2 hours just to get to a boil.
1:50 pm - Bittering hop addition: 1.35 oz. Hallertau.
2: 30pm - Added .65oz Hallertau. Also added wort chiller
(to sanitize w/ heat) and whirlfloc
(to help all the protein/break material settle to the bottom so it doesn't wind up in the fermenter).
2:40pm - Added yeast nutrient.
2.50pm - Turn off heat, and begin cooling. A reading for the Original Gravity (OG) showed we were off our target of 1.053, we had 1.046. Perhaps we didn't boil vigorously enough, which was intentional because we didn't want any carmelization to darken the beer's color. Regardless, it'll still be good. We scaled this beer to a mash efficiency of 75%, and we came out at 74%.
Below are some pics of our new cooling process. After cooling as much as we can with the garden hose hooked to the immersion chiller, we switch over to a cooler full of ice water (and snow this time of year) with a sump pump, and hook that into the immersion chiller. This works very well.
3:30pm - Temp down to 45. Sanitizing fermenter and letting break material settle to bottom of boil pot.
3:50pm - Transferring wort to fermenter. Decanted and pitched the starter at 46F. Most of the foam you see below is just from aeration - trying to get as much oxygen into the wort as possible to help the yeast reproduce. There a little Star San foam in there too. This will be our first time using the new fermentation chamber, a
Sanyo SR-4912M with a Johnson A419 temperature controller. There was a soda can dispenser on the door, which we just cut out so we could fit our carboy w/ milk crate in there. You can't see it, but we also propped the milk crate up 3/4 inch with some boards we cut to fit under the crate, so that the lip on the door could slide under the crate and close wo/ issue. We'll ferment this at 50F for a few weeks before moving onto lagering at 40F or so.
Now for the hardest part - waiting for signs of fermentation, which was 3 days with our last lager. Wish us luck! Cheers.
Edit December 15, 2009: We had fermentation going in less than 24 hours, wooo-hooo!
