Hi, I’m Martin Keen and I’m taking the Homebrew Challenge to brew 99 Beer styles as defined by the BJC P guidelines. But it’s those BJC P guidelines definitions that have got me scratching my head a little bit today. So typically each beer has its own number and letter assigned to it. For example, when I was brewing Czech lagers, I had check pale premium Amber and dark lagers and they were each assigned their own code. Kellerbier however, has two different varieties, pale and Amber, but they’re both stuck under 7C. not really sure why that is, but I got to pick pale or Amber open for Amber because that sounded like a a bit more of an interesting beer.

While the pale Kellerbier]is already a light summery drink. The Amber Kellerbier beer is a much older style and it’s a bit more reminiscent of English cask ales, which sounds great to me. So that’s what I’m brewing. The ingredients for this, for the base malts, I am combining a two to one ratio between Vienna malt and pislner malt. to give me a nice bready texture. So that means I have seven pounds of Vienna malt and three and a half pounds of German Pilsner malt. Then just to deepen the color and give it a bit more flavor, I’m adding three ounces each of melanodin malt and Kara II. Mashing in at my usual 152 Fahrenheit for about an hour, I’m looking to get to a pre-boil gravity of 10 46 which will give me a beer of approximately 5.4% ABV.

Come on, then. While this is mashing, let’s go talk about my yeast bank.

And that solution is stored here in my freezer. It is a frozen yeast bank. Now for each yeast strain, I’ll start off with 10 vials. So what each vile consists of is one 10th of the yeast in a given yeast starter. And when I want to use this for a new beer, I’ll take one of these vials out, defrost it for a few minutes and then pour it into a new starter to start my yeast being built. The yeast in these vials is frozen, it is not dormant and it shouldn’t be dying off. So years from now I should be able to take one of these vials and use it in a year starter and have about the same viability as I would do if I use one today.

So let me show you how to do this because I need to do this now for the yeast that they have for today’s beer. That’s WLP 820 and I don’t have that in my yeast bank, so I want to add it. What you’re gonna need is some glycerin here and a pint Mason jar. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to mix a combination of 25% of the glycerin with 75% of the water, and then you’re going to use a pressure canner where it will stay in here for about 10 minutes. Once you’ve done that, you will have your cryo preservative, which you can use multiple times. So I have got here 10 vials. These are 15 milliliter in size just with a screw cap top. I have a six milliliter syringe. So this part is straightforward. You filled your yeast starter.

I’m using these fast pitch cans here as I’m too lazy to build my own yeast starter and then add the yeast to it, put the yeast on a stir plate, let it spin for a couple of days, and then put it in the fridge so that the yeast will settle to the bottom. Decant your yeast, so there’s really just the yeast cake left at the bottom and just a little bit of liquid to cover it and then give that a shake to get it all mixed in. So if decanted everything except the yeast out of that flask and then moved into this sanitized pint glass and now what I’m going to do is take each one of these VARs, which I’ve also put in the star san here to sanitize and I’m going to put in six milliliters of the yeast. I combine it with six milliliters of the cryo preservative.

Now to freeze these, I can’t just throw them in the freezer, even with the cryo preservative in there, I want to do that using ice appropriate alcohol. So what I’ve got here is I’ve just poured some of that into here. I’m just going to throw these guys into the alcohol. So this will limit the formation of any sort of ice crystals that are going to damage the yeast here by freezing them more slowly in this. I’m going to leave it in here in the alcohol for a day or so. Then I’m going to pull them out by then put them back in here. I’d also, I tend to just write the on the label here, what the yeast it. It’s a pretty handy thing to know.

So the mash has gone as planned. I’ve got a 10 47 pre boil gravity. Now when it comes to hops, this style of beer is actually pretty hoppy compared to the other German lagers that I’ve worked on. I’m going for an IBU 35. Now to get there for my bittering hops, I have one ounce of Hallerauer Mittlefruh, which I’m going to put in here at 60 minutes. Then for the flavor and aroma hops, I’m combining Hallerauer Mittlefruh with Northern brewer hops, I have half an ounce each of Hallerauer Mittlefruh and Northern brewer and with 10 minutes left it’s the same thing, half an ounce each.

The interesting thing about the Kellerbier there is how long the fermentation cycle is. Typically with a lager style beer, you ferment it for a couple of weeks and then you lager it for, you know, three or four more weeks on top of that, at least. This style of beer is supposed to be drunk young. So when fermentation finishes in about 10 days or so, I’m going to move this to a keg, carbonate it and drink it much earlier than I would a normal beer. And see what I get from that.

So it’s tasting time. I have Rick with me. Welcome. Thank you. So what we’ve got here is a Amber Kellerbier. Uh, what do you see with the color? Oh, it’s a beautiful color. It’s, it’s very dark at first glance. I thought it was more of a stout, but yeah, it’s, it’s very nice. It’s got a beautiful dark tone to it. Um, you know, as I, as I smell it, it smells like it’s got some honey in it, some type of honey or, or sweetness, but more of a honey honey smell to it. There’s a, another aspect to it as well, which I won’t mention and tell you the molasses kind. Yeah.

We mean it smells like that smell. So without tasting it. Yeah. Well if you can get through all of that foam. Yeah, it’s true. Let’s give it a try.

So you still getting honey or molasses or something different? Oh, something different. Totally different. Yup. To me it’s, it’s quite malti, uh, sort of a dark malt flavor, not, not roasty. Um, also a little bit sweet as well. It’s a bit sweet and a little bit, a little bitter at the end. So the thing that I told you about the beer that makes it a little bit different is this style of beer is served quite young. So, um, it’s a lager and typically with a lager you’d brew it and then you would lager it, which just means store it cold for, uh, six weeks or so. Um, this style beer, you’re supposed to drink it young. So this is about, well actually this is four weeks old. That is much earlier than I would typically serve a beer for tasting. As it ages, what is, what happens as it ages?

Does that change as far as the flavor and taste of it? Yeah, I think as, as it ages, it would sort of round out a little bit more, be, um, less spiky and in the flavors that are there. So like the bitter flavor. I can definitely taste that, especially with the aftertaste. Um, the aromas does smell a little bit young to me. Um, so, but that’s, that’s what the style is expected to be. So, um, I think if you were to try this beer in a month, it would be a bit more subtle, a bit more well rounded. It’s very nice. I know with all the beers on the market, with all the hoppy beers and friends of mine know that I’m not crazy about the real hoppy beers when there are so many of them. Yes. But this was very smooth, very elegant. Yes. Yeah. Cheers!