Tuesday 7 February 2012

Lager Lager Lager

Yesterday I did a bit of a spontaneous brew with some stuff I had in the house. Decided to try my hand at a lager and make the most of the cold Speyside nights. I used Saflager S23 yeast and it's been doing it's thing in the FV for about a day now. I have managed to find a place in the house to keep it at the recommended 12degrees C. From what I've read it should take 2 to 3 weeks to finish fermenting.

After that it's the weeks of cold storage or lagering that make it a lager. What I normally do is transfer the brew to a 2nd fv, add in a sugar syrup mix to batch prime then bottle straight away to ensure good carbonation. Have done this a few times now and it has always worked out pretty well.

I have read few different things about doing this with lager and there seems to be differing advice on which way to do it. I found a long and very detailed article on lager that sets out the two possible ways. On the lagering/bottle conditioning section it sets out the following:

lagers and bottle conditioning
When bottle conditioning lager beer, there are 2 options for the brewer:

bottle the beer after the primary fermentation and maturation is complete and cold condition the beer in the bottle
bottle the beer after cold conditioning is complete
Both have their pros and cons

bottle conditioning before cold conditioning
When you bottle condition before cold conditioning, you wait until the beer has completed fermentation and prime the beer with corn sugar or DME. Since the yeast is still fairly healthy and active there shouldn't be any problems in getting the beer carbonated. Let the beer carbonate at room temperature for a week. Give it a taste to ensure complete carbonation before moving it to cold storage 32 - 42 *F (0 - 5 *C) to cold condition it.

Because the beer is bottled before cold conditioning, all the yeast and other sediment that settles out during that phase will remain in the bottle.

bottle conditioning after cold conditioning
If you plan to bottle after cold conditioning, as suggested in Noonan's Book "New Brewing Lager Beer", you lager the beer in a carboy first (since you are bottling I’m assuming that you don’t have kegs for cold conditioning). This may take 4 weeks to a few months depending on the beer. Because the yeast has been inactive for such a long time and only little yeast is in suspension anyway, it is recommended to add fresh yeast at bottling time to ensure consistent carbonation in a reasonable time frame. The fresh yeast can come from either dry yeast (1/4 pack should be enough), yeast sediment from the primary fermenter of another batch or Kraeusen. The type of yeast doesn't matter much since the flavor has already been defined during the fermentation and cold conditioning process. Any clean well flocculating ale or lager yeast will do.

When racking from the cold conditioning vessel to the bottling bucket make sure that as little sediment as possible is transferred since the advantage of this method is to leave all this behind and have the beer benefit from bulk-aging.



So I'm wondering does anyone have any thoughts on the above - success, failures, pitfalls etc. Have you done one versus the other, or tried both? Would be interested to hear your experiences.



Cheers

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