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Hoppy Spring Lager

Why I made this beer

My first attempt at a pressure brewed lager. Using dry yeast because I didn’t realize I had a day off until thursday last week. Inspired by Don Osborn’s Hoppy Helles. I got inspired to do a pressure-brewed lager By this video. It’s sunny and just above 50 degrees.

Grains:

  • 10 lbs Dingeman pils
  • .5 lbs CaraMunich

Hops:

  • 20g Centennial 9.3% AA 60m
  • 55g Centennial 9.3% AA 10 min

Yeast:

  • Safale S-23

Process:

Brew Date: 02/20/2023 President’s Day! Gravity: 1.050 (pre boil)
1.055 after 30 minutes
1.065 after 60 minutes and some lost wort from the pump Keg Date: 3/1/2023 Poured a sample on Monday and it read 1.010 - a 7.22% lager in only 1 week!

I let it sit until wednesday night and transferred to a keg while under pressure.

My method for this:

  1. Clean and sanitize keg
  2. Close keg, give a shot of co2 and look for leaks
  3. Attach gas diconnect with naked hose and submerge in water (prefer sanitizer)
  4. Attach liquid side disconnect fermenter out
  5. Let it rip

After about 1 minute the entire batch was transferred and hopefully pushed a lot of the oxygen out of the keg too.

Notes:

My pump took a good 10 minutes to warm up. Not sure what’s up there. Need to start sanitizing it 10 minutes earlier. February hose water is the best 161 after 1 minute 115 after 4 minutes 02/23
4ish gallons 165 > 150 After 1 hour > 149 Batch sparge with 3 gallons @180 7 Gallons @ 1.050

Tasting

3/2/2023 Hops were maybe too old, getting a bit of stale hop flavor. Could definitely use a few more weeks to lager.