Home Brew Forum

I brewed my very first lager yesterday and the sensible thing would have been to keep it simple but where's the fun in that. So to complicate things i opted for a Liquid yeast which will need a stepped starter - WLP838 Southern German Lager yeast. Also as i have 2 empty kegs that need filling i thought i'd do my second full capacity batch on the braumeister. The recipe is based on the Vienna Lager from Greg Hughe's book with a few tweaks. The brew shop didn't have enough Vienna so i substituted Maris Otter, i did think about pilsner but i thought darker colour of the Mo would suit better. I also replaced the Tettnang and Hallertauer Hersbrucker with Saaz and Styrian Goldings as i already had the Saaz and just went with Syrian's because i thought they would go well (also they can go in the next brew).

Vienna Lager
Target Gravity: 1.053
Batch size: 55L
Bitterness:26.4 IBU

Grains
5000g Vienna 40.26%
5000g Maris Otter 40.26%
1600g Munich 12.88%
400g Acid Malt 3.22%
300g Melanoidin 2.42%
120g Chocolate Malt 0.97%

Water Additions
40ml CRS
Camden tablet
2.1g Gypsum
4.3G Calcium Chloride

Mash Schedule
Mash in 55L @ 38C
Step 1: 40 mins @63C
Step 2: 25 mins @73C
Step 3: 10 mins @78C
Sparge 25L @78C

Hop Schedule
80g Nothern Brewer [7%] (90 min) Hops 24.5 IBU
36g Saaz (Aroma Steep)
36g Styrian Goldings (Aroma Steep)

Yeast
White Labs WLP838
Fement @ 12C

Yeast grown over the week, started with a 2 liter split between 2 x 5l water bottles and then stepped up after a couple of days to 8L, left to ferment for another couple of days and the cold crashed. On the brewday i decanted some of the beer off and slowly bought it up to 12C for pitching. It could have done with longer for the cold crash as it looked like a fair bit of yeast was still in suspension.


Grain Shot, bucket has never been so full:


Funneling the malt in:


Malt pipe is quite full but i recon there's still room for more:


Sorting the hops out:


Mid mash stir. I gave the mash a stir at each of the steps:


Mash all done:


Malt pipe lift:


I forgot the pic's of sparging and boiling but here's a pic of the cooling rig. I keep the first couple of buckets of hot water for the clean up:


Looks like i got a good cold break:


The larger capacity does have its challenges. I normally siphon into a 25L fermenter and lift onto the worktop or into the fridge. I can't lift a 60L fermenter so siphoned into a stockpot and then poured it into the fermenter when in situ. The plus side is that hopefully it got well aerated in doing so:


I ended up with about 57L @ 1.56 this would have been diluted down as i added 3L of the starter to give a total of 60L. I forgot to take a reading once diluted but i'll guess it went down to about 1.053


Just have to wait now:


A few tweaks to the process are still needed, its only my second full capacity brew so i need to tweak the beersmith settings for it. I held back some of the sparge water , about 6L knowing that i overshot the volume last time and that i would be putting 3L of starter in it but i still overshot by 5L so next time i'll hold back more. Also as pointed out in the yeast forum when making such a large starter i may as well have just made a small batch of beer so i get more beer out of the process rather than decanting down the sink.
Overall though, pretty pleased so far and the airlock is going today so hopefully thats i good indication that i pitched healthy yeast.

Hope it turns out a good 'un.

This has been plodding along quite nicely, it spent a week at 12C to attenuate down 50% and then i upped the temp to 18C and a week later is down to 1.012. The air lock is still going so i'll give it a day or 2 and then start dropping the temperature. I'm following the lager method from Brulosophy.