We brewed this on January 8th; since we’d been brewing a lot of strong dark beers lately, and the temperature was probably going to stay low enough, we decided to brew a lager. There are really two types of beer, Ale and Lager. This difference is essentially a difference in yeast, though as a result you make changes to a recipe because yeasts each have different flavor profiles. Ales as definition ferment at a higher temperature and the turnaround from brewing to drinking can be as little as a few weeks. They are also top fermenting. Lager, from “to store” in German, is a bottom fermenting yeast, which typically ferments at a much lower temperature (frost-brewed, like in the Coors Train ads). As the name suggests a Lager needs at least a month and typically longer before you can think about drinking it.
Your Bud, Miller, PBR etc. are all some variation on a Bavarian or Bohemian Lager. I don’t have a fridge that I can put my fermentation vessel in, so this type of Lager is out, as are most German style Lagers that are more interesting beers. You probably know of Anchor Steam, which is also a Lager. The thing about Anchor Steam is that its yeast ferments at higher temperature than most Lagers, essentially just a little below the temp range for Ales. The “steam” part is historically anachronistic marketing. Beer nerds refer to the style as California Common, or San Francisco Lager. You can brew this type of Lager in a garage or outside during winter. If you happen to have a root-cellar, that would work also. We’d like to keep our beer around 55*F, but I’ve heard you can do a steam beer at like 65*. The thing with all beer is to keep the temperature from fluctuating very much while it’s fermenting actively. It’s a little out of our control, but fingers crossed for consistent weather.
Recently we’ve been fooling around with doing Partial-Mashes. This might make more sense after you see the process, but there are two ways of making homebrew: 1. You can use a pre-made malt extract (powder or liquid), which is basically a base-malt that is made into wort and then atomized into powder or boiled down into a less than 20% water syrup. 2. You brew All-Grain, purchasing your grains whole and then “mashing” it to extract the sugars. Without getting into the detailed chemistry that I don’t really understand, this is like making a big batch of grain-tea. Partial-mashing is combining elements of both processes. You can do this because of limited space, time, material, money etc. It’s worked pretty well thus far, and as ad hoc as we do it, we get a little more efficient each time.
We’d been talking about doing a steam beer for a while before it would be cold enough outside, so when we finally decided it was time I just looked at a couple of mocked up recipes we had toyed with. I picked one and went with it, although I have to say I’m not sure exactly what I was going for originally. Hopefully I looked into it enough back then. There is a vast amount of recipes and info on “cloning” specific beers online as well as calculators and recipe builders, both for purchase and for free. I use Tastybrew.com, because it’s free. Anyway, this is what ours looks like:
Fermentables:Single Infusion Partial Mash
[2# American Pale Two-row Malt
1# American Dark Munich Malt
.5# Belgian Aromatic Malt
.5# Belgian Biscuit Malt]
3# Amber Dry Malt Extract
2# Corn Sugar
.5# Molasses
Hops:
1.5 oz Amarillo @ 8.5%Alpha Acid for 60 Minutes
.5 oz Cascade @ 6.6% AA for 30 min.
.5 oz Northern Brewer @ 7.8% AA for 5 minutes
Yeast: WLP810 – San Francisco Lager
2.
So for the Partial-Mash there are a few things you have to keep in mind. First, the amount of grain you can use is limited to the amount of water you can heat. The typical ratio is 2 pounds of grain for every 1 gallon of water. Second, there are some grains that lack a certain protein necessary to convert their starches into sugars (this is referred to as a malt’s Diastatic Power, and is derived largely from the way in which the grain was malted, roasted and/or kilned). In this case, both the Belgian malts are of this low diastatic power variety. In order to extract sugars from these grains you need to combine them with malt that has enough diastatic power to compensate. These malts are your base malts, usually either two- or six-row barley. The two- or six- references the number of hulls on the stalk. Every beer used to be six-row but two-row is currently in favor and is supposed to have a less grainy mouth-feel and more delicate flavor. Drinkability, I guess.
For this I am using 2.5 gallons of water and 4 lbs of grain, with another gallon of water to be used later. This is about the limit of what my kettle will hold and I expect to lose half a gallon in the process. There is a lot of science about water Ph and mineral levels, but as far as we’re concerned there are two big rules for homebrew water: if it tastes bad to begin with don’t brew with it, and you cant use distilled water. Anything in between will work. We use five gallons of bulk filtered water from the grocery store.Heat the 2.5 gallons of water to 175*F. When the grain is added this will drop the temp to around 155* which is a pretty average mashing temp. Heat the grain too much or too little and you can end up with a sour or spicy beer, which is actually desirable for some types of Ale, but the spicy or fruity flavors that result will be less integrated/masked in a Lager. There is a whole science to this, but given our resources worrying too much about it is overkill.
Once the temp hits 175 we kill the heat and add the grains inside a fine mesh nylon bag. This is unique to partial-mashing and will lower the attenuation. In All Grain you would want to stir the grain thoroughly and in the lautering process (later) you use the grain bed as a filter, extracting every last bit of sugar you can. Also, you would really want to add the water to the grain, but we don’t have an insulated vessel to use as a Mash Tun.Once the grain is stirred in, cover and leave it off the heat for an hour.
3.
Now we’ve got our hot wort ready to go. Over the last hour the hot water has done its thing and a whole bunch of proteins have broken down to their component parts. At this point we want to run a bunch of the wort back over the grain bed. Ideally this will get the smallest particles of grain that got through the nylon bag to sit on the top of the grain, while soaking out some extra sugars. I say Ideally because it doesn’t work so well in this set up, but it’s better than nothing.
We are using a bottling bucket for this, and running it back into the kettle. This is pretty ugly, and requires one of us to hold four pounds of soaking grain elevated over the mouth of the bucket for a good twenty minutes while the other gently pours very hot wort over the top a few ounces at a time. I did this solo once, and it was a total mess.
Now that we’ve run the wort back over the grain we are going to use that gallon of water we had reserved. This water is at 175 degrees, so it’s hotter than the wort. We run this over the grain a cup or two at a time, again, to get as much of
the sugars as possible. After this you can biff the grains. I’ve heard you can make a decent bread, or flushable kitty litter out of it.
4.
We now have about 3 gallons of wort back in the kettle and heating up. The extra half-gallon of water has been soaked up by the grain or evaporated. As we heat the water we add 3 pounds of Dry Malt Extract. This is a total bitch to dissolve, but it stores better than the liquid alternative and freshness is important.
5.
Once we hit a boil it’s T=60. When you look at Dogfish Head’s IPA’s they are named 60, 90 and 120 minute respectively. This is pretty clever because it references a number of things (amount of hop flavor or IBUs, and alcohol content) but most directly the length of the boil. Boil length has an effect on the protein characteristics of the beer, and will affect flavor and alcohol (in that the more you boil the more water evaporates, strengthening the solution). Because we use a lot of pre-made malt, boiling for more than 60 minutes has little point.
6.
This is our first addition of hops.
You can use pellet hops, which are condensed leaf hops, but half the fun is sticking your face in some fresh cones. The oils on the hop leaf are where the flavor comes from and the utilization of the oil varies based on how long it is boiled. After just a few minutes most of the oil is gone. It seems counter intuitive then to boil them for a long time but there are three basic types of hop additions: Bittering, Flavoring and Aromatic. The longer you boil the hops the more they add to the underlying bitter flavor, so often you will use the hop with the highest Alpha Acid rating as your bittering, or full boil hops. We will do three additions, the first at 60 minutes for bittering, the second at 30 minutes left in the boil for flavoring, and the third a few minuets before we take it off the heat, or at knockout. These last hops will have the most oils left and add most of the bouquet. You can also add hops directly to the fermentation vessel for even more upfront hop character. That is called Dry Hopping, and it kicks ass.
There is actually a ton of things you can do to change how hops taste in the beer, and there are some pretty cool devices like Torpedoes, Randalls and continuous hopping devices.
7.
At a certain point in the boil some remaining proteins will begin to break down. The beer takes on a miso soup look, with bits of matter floating around. This is a good thing and is called a Hot Break. You want some proteins left in the beer because they add to mouthfeel, body and head retention, but too many of the wrong kind will effect how the yeast works and can cause some problems.
With about 15 minutes left in the boil we add the 2# of Corn Sugar and a half-pound of molasses. The Molasses is between 50 and 70% fermentable, but could be as high as 90%. Its important when using added things like molasses or maple syrup that you buy products that don’t use preservatives, because they’ll effect fermentation. The hope here is that molasses will give a little rum or tawny flavor (I guess that’s what I was thinking?). The corn sugar, is 100% fermentable and will bump the alcohol level a bit and help dry the beer out a little.
8.
This is a wort chiller. You run cold tap water through the copper tubing to lower the temperature of the beer. You want to do this as quickly as you can, but if you have snow you can just dunk it in the snow or a sink full of ice.
During the cooling process we take a little time to sanitize some of our equipment. Nothing has to be sanitized that goes into or near the beer before and during the boil; but once it is cool you want to be pretty thorough about cleaning and sanitizing everything. I dunk my arms, surgeon style to the elbow into a sanitizer solution. For some reason, hops when added at this point wont spoil a beer, and dry hoping hops do not have to be sanitized.
9.We’ve cooled the wort down to about 75*. There is a fair amount of grain husk and hop debris in the wort, so we use a fine strainer and pass the wort between a bucket and the kettle. You want to do this a couple of times, getting it to splash around a good deal. When you add the yeast they initially need oxygen to get started converting sugars to alcohol, so aeration is crucial to good fermentation.
We could only boil 3 gallons in our pot, so when we did the
calculations we assumed that we would be topping this up with another two gallons of water. Once we put all of this in the glass Carboy we stir it up really good and stick a wine thief in to take a sample. We use the sample to take a temperature reading and use a hydrometer to get a initial gravity reading. You might remember hydrometers from high school, but they measure the density of a liquid in respect to the force it exerts counter to that of the force of gravity. With beer it is a measure of the sugar content of the water. You can use this to determine the potential alcohol content of your beer after fermentation. The way you do this is by assuming an attenuation rate for your fermentation. Typically this is about 1/4 of the original gravity. So if you have an original gravity reading of 1.040 you will probably end up around 1.010. 
You then take the original gravity reading less the final gravity reading and multiply that number by 131. Gravity readings are dependant on temperature, so you can be more specific in your calculations.You should also taste it.
10.
Add the Yeast.
If you are making a strong beer, say over 1.080 gravity units or 7+% alcohol you should make a starter for your yeast, which is basically just a little bit of the same kind of beer you are going to make more of later. You make a gallon, let it ferment for a day or two or three and then pop it in the fridge for a day. This will cause the yeast to drop out of solution and you can pour off the beer and just add that yeast right to the full batch. Or, if you’re lazy or bad at planning you can just use two vials of pitchable yeast, like this one.
Give the yeast a good stir and pop on an airlock (in this case a tube that ends in a jar of sanitized
water. In a less than a day or two there will be noticeable activity in the carboy, marked by a whipped eggwhite-like Krausen and the airlock will be bubbling away indicating that the yeast are producing a lot of CO2 and alcohol.Now it’s a lot of waiting. For this beer we will let it sit in the garage for two weeks, then take it inside for a day or so and pausing fermentation with the temperature shift. We will then use a siphon and transfer the beer to a new carboy, finally placing that back in the garage for two or three weeks, until we get down to our desired final gravity.
For our Steam Beer our Original Gravity was 1.062, which was a little shy of the 1.065 we were looking for but not too bad considering our methods. This should be around 1.015 when we put it into bottles a month from now giving us a 6%ABV dark amber lager.
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