Kolsch advice

[Matt]

I have a Kolsch recipe from Laurie Strachan's book Great Beers of the World and How to Brew Them:

4.5 kg Pale malt

46 g Tettnang - 60
14g Tettnang - 10
14g Tettnang - 0

However, having trawled a bit, I see Pilsner and Munich malts are the standard.

I have a phial of White Labs Kolsch yeast, so am ready to roll with the above, but do any Kolsch brewers out there think I should use a more standard grain bill - is it critical?

Cheers,
Matt

[mysterio]

I've brewed a couple of Kolschs, the first one was so-so but the second one was spot on to the ones i've had in Germany. The first one I used 95% pils malt, 5% wheat malt and US-56. It was fine but a little bland. The second one I brewed I used the WL yeast you have and about 90% pils malt, 5% munich & 5% wheat (similar to the recipe here: http://www.beerdujour.com/Recipes/Jamil/Kolsch.html). The crucial thing with this beer is to ferment it fairly cool, around 15C. You can then lager it for a few weeks if you want. The recipe you posted would work out fine so long as you controlled the fermentation, but I can recommend the one in the link posted.

[retourrbx]

I have a Kolsch in the secondary at present - after the primary I had a taste and there was nothing there - rather than risk some mildly alcoholic water, I dry hopped it with around 40g of Hellertauer - we'll see how it comes out in a few weeks. I got the recipe from beertools.com, handy for scaling a recipe

[Matt]

Thanks for the comments gents. I'll do some IBU comparisons to your recipes.

Would be interested to hear how the dry hopping goes Retourrbx.

Matt