Finishing Marzen-Oktoberfest

[Kinley]

I could do with a little help with a M-Okt. brew currently at 1022. I want to finish this beer in proper style. As I understand this style would be lagered in caves which have an ambient temperature of around 8C. This seems a bit warm so I thought to lager it at 5C. Would this still be too warm? I also want to naturally carbonate and will krausen after lagering. Which leads me to my next question: when to lager? Can I start at, say, SG 1014 (FG should be 1011) then krausen without further malt additions? Or should I ferment out, lager and krausen with high SG wort?

Help appreciated.

[Barley Water]

Well if I were you, I would make sure that the beer attenuates all the way down before starting the lagering. One of the problems you can get into with lager yeast is that the stuff doesn't dry out the beer enough so you end up with beer that is way too sweet. I would also recommend doing a diacetyl rest, just to make sure the yeast cleans the beer up well and it also helps with the attenuation issue. I have never kraussened beer as I tend the force carbonate my German stuff so I really can't help you there but I would consider reyeasting if you lager the beer cold for any lenght of time since the primary yeast won't be in that great a shape afer the cool conditioning.

[Kinley]

Thanks for the reply. I did the rest at 1020 and will ferment out.

[EoinMag]

I made a lager a while back and to prime it I used a smaller 5l brew of the same recipe for the priming. The advice on a German forum that I go to was to keep back about 10% of the original brew and freeze it for priming later. It was too late for me to keep it back so I made up a new mini brew for it. Next time I'd actually go with a lower percentage than 10% as some of my bottles were very lively to the point of being gushers and I had no infection that's 100% sure. I think this is the process called Krausening, but in fairness it's not a term I hear the Germans using at all, so I've a feeling it's more of an English term.

The information I have is that the temperatures in the caves were more like 0c and was advised to go with about 4c, I actually went with 2c and it dropped crystal clear.

[urbanvet]

Annoyingly this brew has ester-ified. I rested at 16C (fermentation was 12C) and within 36 hours the clean (ironically no diacetyl) taste had become ester soup. I'll lager at 4C and force carb this one in the hope of saving it but to be honest it is f***ed.

EoinMag - that sounds what I should be doing. Next time...