Now, lagers are the greyhounds of the beer world: a racing greyhound (poor thing) has no surplus fat, a lager is super clean with no yeast-derived flavors, just clean malt and hop flavors, malty/hoppy. (An ale is like the St Bernard of the beer world, shaggy, fuller bodied and complex with flavors from any source, including yeast, welcome.
Looking for a lager that combines juicy malt with an interesting and complex interleaving of hop flavors. Not a session beer for guzzling, not a winter warmer to sniff and sip over a couple of hours but a beer in between a sipper and a quaffer. Try and maximise what can be done in a small (3-3.5Kg mash)
Now, hop flavors are easy to produce, will probably interleave spicy and floral or citrus: spicy saaz and citrusy/piny Amarillo, so Northern Brewer and minty Perle for bittering, Amarillo at 30 minutes, Saaz at 15, Amarillo at 5. Or use Amarillo & Nelson Sauvin for quite fruity flavor, hmmm lovely choice there to be made.
This is a Part Mash Pack, going to aim for 1050-55 starting gravity for about 5-5.5% alcohol. So we can have 3-3.5Kg grain (the partmash) and a can of Coopers light, amber or wheat malt extract. Probably will specify the light but the amber has a little bit of crystal malt in it for a bit more richness while wheat malt will add a wheaty tang and a thick head (on the beer!) that lasts plus awesome mouthfeel but the wheaty tang may clash with the juicy malt? Choices choices
Quiz: with lagers I never ever use any sugar in any form, cane sugar, dextrose, invert cane sugar, glucose syrup, nuttin. Anyone bar Lefty any idea why?
We want some lovely juicy malt: German Pilsner malt (means need to do a stepmash so more malty malty with a decoction) with some German melanoidin malt for even more malty-malty. No real need for any Munich or Amber malt with that malt bill. Going to add 25g black patent malt for nuttiness. Was thinking of adding 75g chocolate malt for coffee-ish taste and color but if I do might need to slightly alter the hop bill, increasing the amarillo--think of dark chocolate covered dried orange. I think I will go this way, so out go Saaz and Nelson Sauvin hops and in comes even more gorgeous Amarillo. Bump up the chocolate malt to balance, 100g plus 25g black patent malt.
Quiz: why is roasted malt (aka black malt) called black patent malt?
An important parameter is the bitterness:starting gravity ratio, BU:GU in short. So let us fix the OG at 1055 (55 GU or just 55 for short and for calculations) will need a bit of assertive bitterness to balance the abundance of juicy malt. So a BU:GU of .75 so our target bitterness becomes:
BU/55=.75, rearrange BU = 55 * .75 = 41
A BU:GU of .75 is just below the bitterness you would get in an English Ordinary Bitter
Going to get half the bitterness from the 30/15/5 minute additions, sneaking in a bit of Nelson Sauvin to add a hint of tropical fruit to the Amarillo citrus flavor/aroma.
The lager will be amber colored, in no way near a porter or stout in color, almost a combination of the James Squire Amber & Golden Ale in color & flavor.
We haven't finished yet, still one most important choice to make, one lots of brewers don't pay anywhere near enough attention to: the yeast. This lager with its juicy malt cries out for a lager yeast that leaves the beer round and full bodied. Our lager is not a bock (single, dubbel, tripel or quadrupel) but the yeast usually used for bocks is ideal! So, Wyeast Munich Lager 2308 or WY Bavarian Lager 2206. Another choice would be WY 1728 Scottish Ale. At lager temps this works as a lager yeast (think where Scotland is, not in the Arctic circle but you can see it from there!)
There still are details like a water bill and mash schedule etc to work out.
So having worked this out in my mind and doodling the workings out here I can now sit down at a spreadsheet and calculate the recipe in detail, possibly making some minor tweaks to the idea (e.g. if not prescribing a can of liquid wheat malt will likely add as much as 400g wheat malt.
Thought it might be interesting for those who drink beer to see how a beer recipe could be designed. A general description which gives a word picture of the final beer, the consideration of malt & hop bills, choice of yeast are made interactively/reiteratively as we refine a detailed picture of the beer.
Calculating a recipe. Base malts have a know amount of gravity that they will put into a certain volume of beer, expressed as points per kilo per litre. At 75% mash efficiency the figure for base malts is 229, i.e. mashing a kilo of grain to produce a litre of wort will mean that wort has a gravity of 1.229 also written as 1229 and 229 etc and these figures (available from maltsters websites) generally work out at 229 etc, good enough for small homebrew mashes though commercial brewers need the figures to a few decimal places for each individual batch of malt.)
Hops have alpha acids in the soft resins that give hops their bittering powers. Unlike malt the AA for hops varies from season to season and from hop to hop. You would not use a 2%AA hop for bittering--you would have to add so many hops the beer would not be economic and would have a vegetative taste (according to the literature, I did brew a 12% spiced lager once and used Hallertau hop pellets of 2%AA for a lovely soft bitterness and a fair bit of hop flavor that survived the 60 minute boil.) For hops we need to take into account a utilisation factor: the higher the gravity of the wort (i.e. the stronger the resulting beer) the less you get out of hops. For real hop bombs the formula used to calculate the bitterness breaks down a bit, because as the amount of hops increases the bitterness provided by each extra gram of hops decreases. Since our palates are not good at detecting differences in bitterness levels that doesn't really matter a bit.
