Lager Brewing Tips 2.5.07 Thinking about brewing a lager style beer? He’s a few tips to help ensure success on your first try. For an in-depth scientific analysis of lager brewing, please refer to Greg Noonan’s New Brewing Lager Beer available at our store. 1) Perform a Yeast Starter   Purpose: To encourage a vigorous fermentation and complete attenuation of fermentables. Ensure a “clean” flavor profile. Procedure: The cool fermentation temperature required for lager beer stresses yeast. Along with properly aerating your wort (by either shaking the fermenter vigorously, sloshing the chilled wort back and forth between two buckets, sloshing the water used to top up your wort, or pumping in pure oxygen through a aeration stone), ALWAYS prepare a starter for your lager yeast. This serves to increase the cell count and metabolize your yeast in preparation for successful battle with the sweet wort. Refer to Yeast Info tab on the homepage for a detailed procedure.   Consequences of disregarding: Sluggish fermentation, incomplete attenuation, flaws in flavor profile.     2) Pitch Yeast at 70 F – 75 F Purpose: To ensure a vigorous initial fermentation. Procedure: Pitching active yeast into warm wort encourages the yeast to begin the fermentation process right away. The more vigorous the initial fermentation, the more likely complete attenuation will occur. Once the fermentation commences, reduce the temperature. Each strain of lager yeast has its own temperature range, find out what your choice requires. (Most call for a range of 50 F – 55 F) Reduce to target temperature over a few days, a degree or two at a time. If you’re employing a cool room or garage instead of a regulated lager chamber, just do the best you can.      Consequences of disregarding: Sluggish initial fermentation, increased diacetyl production. 3) Fermentation Temperature Purpose: Achieve the optimal temperature range for each strain of lager yeast. Procedure: The warmer the fermentation temperature, the more active the fermentation and vice-versa. Lager beers are fermented cool, but not necessarily cold. As stated above 50 F – 55 F is the usual temperature range for most ordinary lager yeast strains. After reducing wort from pitching temperature to cool fermentation, maintain the specified temperature until final gravity is nearly reached (1.005, or a “half a point” from target final gravity should be good). Consequences of disregarding: Sluggish and/or no fermentation if fermented too cold, ale like flavor profile if fermented too warm. 4) Perform a Diacetyl Rest (DR) Purpose: Allow yeast to remove diacetyl (buttery flavors and aromas) from the beer.   Procedure: After the cool primary fermentation, allow the wort to slowly warm up to 60 F – 70 F for at least 3 days to encourage, in the words of Greg Noonan, “a diacetyl rest to reinvigorate the yeast culture so that it will metabolize diacetyl, removing it from solution” (Noonan p. 185). To do this, just bring it inside, upstairs, or out of the chamber. This temperature increase also allows the lager beer to achieve final gravity before the actual lagering stage.   Consequences of disregarding: Diacetyl in your beer! A buttery distortion of your beer’s potential. Incomplete fermentation, possible contamination and spontaneous fermentation of residual sugars. 5) Lager your beer Purpose: Achieve the crisp, snappy and clean flavor profile desired in lager beers. Procedure: After the diacetyl rest, transfer the beer from primary to secondary (preferably a 5 gallon carboy). Reduce from DR temperature to the low 30’s, as close to 32 F as you can get, over a period of a week or so. Try brining it down a degree or two a day. Hold at 32 F – 35 F for 2 – 6 weeks. The longer the lager stage, the crisper and more mature your lager will taste.      Consequences of disregarding: Beer lagered for too short a period of time will have a “green”, immature taste.     6) Prime, Package and Store Purpose: Carbonate lagered beer Procedure: As beer lagers over a period of weeks, the yeast flocculates out of solution and becomes dormant. Stressed at a cold temperature and deprived of food, fresh yeast is required for bottling (This is obviously not a problem for kegging). Any good dry beer yeast will work, a lager yeast is not necessary (Try Safbrew T – 58 from Fermentis). Prime and bottle as usual, adding the creamed yeast to the cooled priming agent in the bottom of the bottling bucket. Allow bottles to warm to 68 F and hold until carbonation is achieved. Store at cellar temperature. Refrigeration is nice, but not completely necessary. Avoid sudden temperature shifts. Keep away from heat and light! Consequences of disregarding: Non-carbonated beer. Prematurely stale beer.