Black "Lager"

Another cool day, some flurries of snow, and a black "lager." This is our attempt at a German Schwarzbier, but with a twist. Instead of using a traditional lager yeast, we are using California Lager yeast which produces clean lager-like characteristics at higher temperatures. Our garage has been in the mid-50's lately and by using a swamp cooler, my goal is to keep the beer at 52 throughout fermentation which is cooler than ale temperatures (~65) and warmer than lager temps (~44). We'll also try to age this beer in the coldest part of the garage for a month or so before we start drinking it to help smooth things out.

This was also the first time acidifying the mash. Optimal mash pH's are between 5.1-5.4 and when you are out of this range the mash is not as efficient and you can extract some off flavors from the grains. Our water has a lot of carbonates resulting in "hard" water. The only way to get them out would be to dilute with distilled water or use something like pickling lime. Other options include adding calcium ions to the water to help lower the pH, but we would need a lot of calcium (likely too much) to accomplish this. Previously, I have just been trying to get "close" to the pH range by adding salts as needed and hoping for the best. Now, by simply adding an acid to the mash I can lower the pH into an optimal range and not have to go overboard on the salts. This batch required 2.7 mL of lactic acid to give an estimated pH of 5.3, and I noticed a small 3% bump in our efficiency.

I hope that the acids will really help in our lighter colored beers because they contain little, if any, dark malts (dark malts are more acidic than less kilned malts). Our IPAs especially could use some water adjustments.

We've started drinking the newest one and it is pretty good; not as good as the double pale ale, but still decent. It could use a little more bitterness, but the aroma and flavors are good. The biggest flaw in my opinion, is the finish. The beer is not crisp and dry like commercial IPAs and could result from a variety of issues. One is water: either we need more sulfates (to accentuate the hops) or less carbonates (we'll likely cut the next batch with distilled water to try that) or our mash pH is off (we'll definitely use lactic acid in that batch). Another problem could be the grain bill, but ours is pretty simple, but we might make some minor tweaks for the next attempt.

I also racked the barleywine to secondary today and took a gravity reading. It went from 1100 to 1024 for 10% alcohol. We'll secondary it for a while probably bottle it in March.

Upcoming events:

We'll be dryhopping the black IPA on Friday and bottling 10 days after that. Next scheduled brew is our First Snow Winter Ale (which will use the same yeast as the Schwarzbier). After that we'll bottle the Dubbel and possibly brew an American Stout followed by an Anchor Steam-type beer.