|BACKGROUND|

As much as I have a flair for the dramatic and obscure, I do have an appreciation for the classics.

While the general majority might collectively shit themselves every time that Mankish/Other Half/Trillium/Tired Hands/etc. release another murky, hazy, DDH kick your tits off juice bomb of a hazy DIPA, it’s important to remember where all this even comes from.

Germany didn’t have a prohibition or any dumb shit like that (fight me about the Reinheitsgebot), so their game is razor fucking sharp. You want a tight butthole lager? You reach for that goodness from the fatherland.

Full disclosure: I can’t brew lagers. Not that I haven’t in the past (professionally, to boot!), but I don’t have a functional fermentation chamber that I can keep the lager cold enough to ferment properly.

Solution to this problem? Same as 90% of my problems, say “fuck it” and work around it. So comes into play the steam beer.

Historic steam beer, popularly associated with San Francisco and the U.S. West Coast, was brewed with lager yeast without having the capabilities to properly control temps, i.e. they jerry rigged the shit out of these beers. It was considered a cheap and low-quality beer.

Through a different lens, Modern steam beer is known as California common beer. Anchor Brewing Company made the style popular, but they also trademarked the term “Steam Beer” in 1981. I get it, it’s a brand, but kinda a dick move to trademark an entire style of beer. So, now anyone who makes one has to call it a CA Common.

In summary: brew a lager, pitch a lager yeast, let that shit ferment at ale temps. Easy enough, yeah?

This is also where I should mention that summers in Southeast Pennsylvania can be fucking brutal. Throughout the course of the brewday, I think the temps outside got up to about 98F and something like nasty as balls% humidity that day. Much like lager yeasts, I’m not a big fan of heat. This led to many tiny, but agitating, mistakes and headaches through the course of the day. Luckily, at least the basement is temperate, as the house itself has no central air or effective cooling capacity (and it’s an old ass house), so I was going to be relying heavily on ambient temps on this batch.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5 gallons

Mash Temp: 152F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 74%

Original Gravity: 1.042 // 10.5 P

Final Gravity: 1.010 // 2.6 P

Estimated ABV: 4.5%

IBUs: 18.4

SRM: 9.8 EBC // 5 SRM

Recipe

Malts

7# Floor-malted Belgian Pilsner| 78%

1# Munich | 11%

.5# CaraPils | 5.5%

.5# Melanoiden | 5.5%

Hops

1 oz. Hallertau Mittelfrüh @ 60 min.

1 oz. Saphir @ 5 min.

Yeast

2 packs of Saflager 34/70 (Which I think is Weihenstephaner in origin?)

|BREW LOG|

The first point of fun on this brew was that I got to break in a new toy – a new grist mill! Honestly, it was long overdue and it seems to have drastically helped with controlling the efficiency drop that I had noticed with buying pre-milled grains. It was a birthday present to myself.

For shits and giggles, I started to crank it by hand, just to see how stupid of an idea that was. Answer: once again, fuck that. So, ever faithful method of using the drill. It ripped through that shit like a champ.

Outside of that, it was pretty much business as usual for doing the mash. Aside from the fact that I accidentally heated the mash water a little too high, so I ended up having to stir and wait a few minutes to bring it down a couple of degrees.

All in all, I guess it was a mild success, it came in slightly high, but definitely within my acceptable thresholds. After about 15-20 minutes, I stole a sample of the mash and took a pH reading, which was pretty much right on the money.

Dat Temp Dat pH

After a 60 minute mash, I vorlaufed lightly with a giant measuring cup, which has become relatively unnecessary with the BrewBag in the mashtun, but I still like doing it to help settle the grain bed and clarify as much as I can. Afterwards, I sparged like normal and collected about 7.5 gallons into the brew kettle.

Simplicity is the name of the game with this beer, and I also had a good deal of prep work to get ready for finishing this and starting the second half of the brewday, which was going to be the Brett IPA. At this point, I decided to take my two sachets of yeast and rehydrate them to get a head start on the brew.

At the start of the boil, I added in one of the two hop additions, which is odd for me to be able to actually walk away from a boil and do other things.

After 45 minutes had elapsed, I came back and chucked in a tab of whirlfloc, had a cigarette, and then added the last hop addition. Boil finished, and it was time to chill.

With the July sun bearing down on me like angry badgers chasing a one-legged toddler, this was going to be a true test of my cooling system. My goal was to get it as low as possible as fast as possible, ideally down into high lager temps to start fermentation and allow the beer to ramp itself up to about 70F and finish out fermenting. With surprising success, I managed to drop the temperature down to about 55F in roughly twenty minutes, which I can only call an overwhelming success, given the circumstances. At this point, it was time to move the beer from the kettle to the carboy and pitch the yeast.

Having allowed the yeast to fuck off and do its own thing the whole time after I had rehydrated it, I came back to find that it had somehow gone absolutely apeshit, especially because I had only added it to maybe a half cup of room temp RO water.

As you can see, it essentially looked like a giant glass of Wendy’s chocolate frosty – a sign of good things to come, I suppose. Then came the ol’ pitch-n-sit. Let the yeast go to town and do the damn thing. Final gravity came out to 1.042, slightly lower than my estimate of 1.045 by the grain bill, but it’s fine.

I was shooting for light, low ABV, crushable pseudo-lager. So far to that end, I had achieved my goal.

Fermentation turned out to be an interesting twist. I checked in on the brews about 3 days after brewing them to see how fermentation was going. I was told that there was “little to no blowoff tube activity”, which I said couldn’t have been right. Even than I had warned ahead of time that, since it was a lager yeast, it would also not have a crazy big krausen like most of the other brews that we had done. Turns out that is fucking bullshit, because that beer looked like a fucking ‘Nam of a fermentation, complete with probably a good cup and a half of krausen in the half gallon I use for blow off, complete with giant ass yeast rafts. But it looked like a goddamn Helles lager.

At this point, I called bullshit that they beer was finished so fast, even at, what I could tell from the temp probe on the other beer, around 74F fermentation temp. Using a sanitized turkey baster as a thief, the hydrometer showed the beer reading at 1.010. So yeah, it had finished fermenting. I was hoping for a little bit lower of a finish, closer to 1.007-.005 to hit at least 5% ABV, but I’m not gonna argue with the results.

Bottling day was scheduled for the Monday after next, allowing for a nice dose of gelatin to help fine the beer additionally (two Tbsp in a cup of water) 3 days before bottling.

On bottling day, I made a simple syrup with table sugar for priming at a concentration of 2/3 cup (rougly 4.6 oz) of sugar in 8 oz. of water, estimating a 5.5 gallon batch and shooting for 2.3 vol of CO2. I actually overestimated how much of a yield I had, I guess I had use a slightly smaller carboy (5 gal instead of 6 gal), so my final volume ended up at 5 gal instead of 5.5, meaning that I had primed for 2.5 vol of CO2, which is actually still appropriate for the style, just I was playing it a little on the safer side to not over carbonate the beer. Not terribly mad. Final gravity of the beer still ended up at 1.010, meaning I had netted a final gravity of roughly 4.5% ABV.

Tasting Notes

I’m pleased a punch on how this one turned out.

Legit, if I didn’t know what this was and how I made it, I’d probably have assumed that it was a drier helles or a pilsner (blindfolded, it’s dark for a true pils). This tastes straight up like a proper lager, to the point that I’m reconsidering if I actually need to build a fermentation chamber to do it right. This, at least, loans itself to the plans for my doppelbock later this year.

As for the appearance, the gelatin did the damn thing. Shit is crystal clear when it’s at proper serving temp, with some slight chill haze when it’s fresh out of the fridge. I was shooting for more of the helles/märzen color, which doesn’t quite match the flavor, but it’s still unbelievably crushable. I’m pleased.

Flavor wise, it has the faintest hint of sulfur to it, as a lot of lagers tend to, but not anything that wouldn’t be stylistically appropriate. The flavor is crisp and clean, with a delicate bitterness, almost on line to be a step or two removed from Czech-style. Despite the later addition of Saphir hops, as well, it’s not overwhelmingly orange or anything. It’s a smooth, earthy bite. The grist shines through with a solid carbonation level, letting some of the nuance of the malts pull through as well.

Overall, goddamn. If you like brewing and you like lagers, but you don’t have stringent temp control, you no longer have an excuse. Get it in.

I’d also be remiss to not throw a shout out to Greg Foster for his multi-part experiment playing with temps and 34/70 yeast. Knowing that I could pull this shit off was half the reason I even thought I could do this, and knowing is half the battle.