Lager Brewing

Tuesday marked our first brew in quite some time.  It felt like an eternity between sessions, but now we're doubling up and going again tomorrow.  Tuesday was different for a couple of interesting reasons.  First, we used my apartment since that's where the chest freezer is living.  Second, we used leaf hops instead of pellet hops.  Third, we actually used an online site to get the recipe correct.

A little about our creative process.  I'm not ashamed to say that we use a Clone Recipe book as a basis for all our brews.  We decide what type of beer to brew, look up some recipes and choose one.  Then we decide how we want to tweak it to make it our own.  This might include changing one type of hops, adding some sort of other ingredient (honey, brown sugar, etc.)  Up to this point, we never paid attention to IBU's, temperatures or specific gravities.  I mean, we measured the original gravity and final gravity to get an ABV reading, but never tried to hit a target.  The thought process was that we would get the right amount of ingredients in at the right time and, voila, beer would emerge.  And emerge it did.  But it could be better.

This time we fed our recipe into a recipe calculator (at www.hopville.com) and made sure to match the temperatures to get specific IBU's and ABV.  Amazingly, we hit all of our targets on the first try.  That isn't to say we didn't have any trouble.  About 40 minutes into the boil, I realized we put the wrong amount of water into the calculator.  Suddenly, our IBU went from 39 to 25.  Holy Crap!  Luckily we had extra hops and the website.  Dan and I (Casey was out grabbing our Ledo's Pizza) fed some quick numbers into the calculator and now our lager is quadruple-hopped and is 36 IBU's.  Disaster averted.

The other odd change was the whole leaf hops.  I'm used to the pellet hops just disintegrating as they are poured into the wort.  I don't know why I was surprised, but the leaf hops don't do that.  They steep like tea. Now, instead of a clear wort, we have a pound of hops boiling in water.  That's fine, but straining that out took some creativity.  We scooped the hops into a strainer, then Casey used the bottom of a pot to press out the extra wort.  That was not in our original plans.

In the end, I'm really excited about this lager, named Tongue.  It's sitting in my freezer and fermenting at about 50 degrees.  The Irish Moss we used was already clarifying the beer, so hopefully it will be a nice, clear yellow color.  The competition is weighed heavily on accuracy to style and cleanliness.  That's 85% of the score.  Fingers crossed, this will be our first excellent beer.