I always enjoy a nice Vienna style lager, so I figured I would give one a run here! Very simplistic and malt-forward, this small batch lager is also serving double duty to grow up my fresh pack of 34/70 yeast for bigger future batches.
Vienna Lager - brewed 11/9/2013 (3.25 gallons)
- Vienna Malt: 5 pounds - Munich Malt: 1 pound - Hallertau pellets: 1 oz @ 60, 1/8 @ 10 (do to calculated hop degredation, I am using 3.8% AAs here) - 34/70 Weihenstephaner Lager yeast (full dry pack)
efficiency of 78%: OG 1.052 - IBU ~22 - ABV 5.2%
Brew day went pretty well. Started the mash at 151°, but it fell to 147° over the course of the hour. so I ramped it up to 156° for 15 minutes before mashing out at 168° for another 15. A little longer time and a little more work, but I've had much worse things to deal with in the past! The boil went perfect, and I ended up with dang near 3 gallons in the fermenter, while I left some crud behind in the kettle. Now, all there is left to do is wait for the yeast to do their thing! Like before, I am simply leaving it be for 3 weeks...easy peasy!
Bottled this up (yes: BOTTLED!) on 12/6/2013. The sample was excellent and quite reminiscent of Negra Modelo...which was the intention actually. The reason for bottling was two-fold: 1) I was curious to see how bottling a lager actually would work out and 2) wanted to keep a keg free (for Snowfall Bock). So I batch primed with enough sugar to, hopefully, get around 2.3-ish volumes of CO2. The rough plan is to let it sit in the low to mid 60s until around new year's, then chill a bottle for a few days and see where I'm at. worst case: the bottles don't carbonate and I simply "lager" in these bottles until I can dump them all into a keg. if it's good, well right into the fridge they'll go! if it is carbed, but not THERE yet, I'll let them sit in my should be damn near freezing garage for a few weeks.
update: as you can see from the pic, this experiment worked! it carbonated quite nicely IMO. Lots of tight little bubbles that one comes to expect when drinking a lager. The taste is very reminiscent of an Oktoberfest according to the people that tested this without knowing exactly what it was prior to sampling. Easy drinking, slightly toasty, a hint of malty sweetness, and a little spicy citrus from the hops. Overall, this is a very quaffable, mass-appeal type, lager beer.