But if you’re feeling more adventurous, and/or you’ve made this beer and it still seems a little sweet for whatever reason, you can go with the same amount of chocolate malt (350L). The safe route is Carafa II, a dehusked chocolate malt that will mostly just add color. What you will add, though, is a dash of dark malt (3 oz/85 g)-and here, you have a choice to make. Each will add light character-malt flavors like bread and toast, but none will get you all the way to “rich” or “caramel.” In fact, this beer contains no crystal or caramel malts at all. In that spirit, start with 4 lb (1.8 kg) of 9 Lovibond Munich malt and 3 lb (1.4 kg) each of Maris Otter and Vienna malt. So, this recipe is top-to-almost-bottom darker base malts, with just a touch of dark malt for color and bit of drying. In this case, we want as much toasted character as we can get, but we don’t want sweetness-and I’ve always found that Pilsner malt imparts a honey-like sweetness on my palate. Heck, two of my three Pilsner recipes don’t even contain Pils malt. Some people seem to think that just because a beer is European that it must contain Pilsner malt. Another way to conceptualize it is as a German lager version of special bitter, but with more carbonation and less sense of humor. The best examples of Vienna Lager are like drinking a liquid version of dry toast. The Vienna is lighter (in body, color, and ABV), slightly more bitter (or at least seems so), and lands in a place where it’s toastier than the pale German lagers but nowhere near the caramel and melanoidin-heavy richness of “modern” Oktoberfest. That beer is actually much more akin to a Helles with a more floral hops nose, whereas most domestic “Oktoberfest-style” beers have more in common with bock than Vienna lager. “But wait,” you’re thinking, “don’t they drink Oktoberfest by the liter?” They do indeed drink liters of beer at Oktoberfest celebrations, but the beer you’re most likely to get today when it’s labeled “Oktoberfest” is much richer and caramel-heavy than what they’re downing in Munich. Both are amber lagers of Germanic origin, but the Vienna is much more sessionable than the Oktoberfest. StyleĪlthough it bears some superficial resemblance to Oktoberfest, the Vienna lager is a distinctly different animal. It’s also a low-ABV beer that holds up beautifully to age, so if it ends up waiting in line to get on tap, I still have a great beer ready to go. Partly, I love it because some beers just stick in your head (I can’t forget, for some reason, that this beer was invented by Anton Dreher in the 19th century), but mostly I love it because it delivers the toasty malt flavors I love with a dry and clean background. But around Christmas, I get to go back to brewing whatever I feel like brewing, and a perennial favorite is the Vienna lager. Throughout the fall, I’m usually brewing beers for the holiday parties (which I now get to drink, so that’s nice) or brewing the bigger/darker beers that people will want when we get snowed in. When it starts it’ll gush so be ready to close the valve if/when it does.Īfter you’ve dumped, give the tank a day or two to resettle, then transfer into your serving keg.I love the Christmas holiday season, and not just because I get lots of time off work-it’s how I use that time. Just barely crack the dump valve and wait for flow to start. If you want, you can dump trub before crashing or after (or both), but remember you’re pressurized and you need to dump very slowly and very carefully or else you’ll end up with a real mess while leaving a lot of the trub still in the tank. Then you can cold crash to near freezing. After 3~5 days, fermentation should be complete. Let the fermentation go until you get gravity readings about 5 points from where you think Final Gravity will be when fermentation is complete.įor instance, if your estimated final gravity will be 1.010 SG, when SG reaches 1.015, raise the fermenter temperature to about 65~70F and attach a spunding valve set to slightly more than 1 BAR pressure (say 16 psig, if your tank can safely sustain that pressure). Unitanks are great! No need to ‘secondary’, plus lots of reasons not to.
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