Bavarian Lager? 9th June ‘07

 Well I had a chance to do another brew on Saturday and as I said I would in my post Perle Amber ale 3^rd June I dropped the new brew straight onto the yeast cake from that brew. 

Once again I’ve been pushed for time and my ‘kettle’ is still out of action so I’ve just done an extract brew to save a bit of time.

Ingredients:

• Coopers Bavarian Lager Kit,
• 1 kg light dry malt extract,
• 500grams generic brand honey (not looking for honey flavours, just wanted to lighten the body of the beer),
• 200 grams crystal malt (colour 140 EBC),
• 25 grams Saaz Hops (pellets)

Method:

This brewing session was much the same as my Perle Pale ale, so I’ll not go into too much detail on the brewing of it.

Put Crystal malt (crushed) into 2 litres of water and start heating until it just starts to boil (can even be stopped just before this stage) and strain into the main pot when ready, this can occur at anytime during the preparation of the main wort.

Heat up another 5 litres of water and add the Coopers Bavarian lager kit, Dry malt extract, Put hops into a ‘hop bag’ and the honey and bring to the boil.

I’ve used a “hop bag” this time mainly as the hops were in pellet form, using whole hops I find I don’t really need to use the hop bag as the hop flowers form quite a good filter by themselves and don’t release too many small particles.

Once the wort boils take immediately off the heat cover and place into a larger container of cold water to cool it a little.

While the wort is cooling, transfer the current brew into another ‘barrel’ or other suitable container for secondary fermentation, fill newly emptied fermenter with approximately 15 litres of cold water, squirting it in under pressure to stir up the yeast cake at the bottom of the barrel and also forcing some extra oxygen into the water which helps the yeast get going, add the wort (which will be still quite warm to hot), the temperature hopefully will stabilise around 16-18˚C which is a good starting temperature for a lager. Top up the fermenter to 24-25litres and take a SG reading

Should be around 1.050

As the brew has been put onto an existing yeast cake, fermentation will become visible very quickly, most likely there will be a strong fermentation within 45 minutes, I would strongly recommend that you do not use this method with a very heavy beer and an ale yeast, such as a stout, as the fermentation will be so strong that it is likely the beer with attempt to ‘crawl’ out of the airlock, using this method with lager yeast at low temperatures usually keeps this under control a little (although I have had a lager crawl out of the airlock once before gravity of 1.065)

The next morning I found the fermentor had cooled nicely to 12˚C  so it was time to put into my “fermentation chamber”, actually an old refrigerator, which works really well at this time of year to hold the temperatures stable i.e. The heat losses from the refrigerator=the heat generated by the yeast.

Although I won’t need it for this brew, I have set the refrigerator up with a temperature sensor, so I can turn on the compressor if I need to remove some heat in summer or for lagering, or turn on a small light bulb mounted inside, which can be used for heating. I’ll go into detail on how this is controlled thought a Linux PC I have running in the shed in another post.

This beer should actually have quite a rapid fermentation due to the very large number of starting yeast cells from the previous beer, I suspect it will be finished fermentation in about 5 days rather than the 10 I usually expect for lagers at low temperatures.

Looks like next weekend is a bottling or kegging weekend