Die Bier, Die (2016) Brew Day

It's been over seven months since our last brew day, but we're finally back to brewing! We took our day off on Memorial Day and brewed what is mostly a repeat of last year's Die Bier, Die Oktoberfest. The only recipe difference from last year is the yeast. Annapolis Home Brew once again didn't have Wyeast Munich Lager (the preferred yeast from the recipe book), but when I called Maryland Home Brew they recommended White Labs Southern German Lager so that's what I went with. It'll be fun comparing it to last year's with the only recipe difference being the yeast.

With such a long hiatus we were showing a little bit of rust with a couple minor mistakes during the brew day. First, I accidentally put the recipe into BeerSmith as a 60 minute boil instead of the 90 that the recipe in the book called for. The boil time gets used to calculate boil-off, which in turn affects the amount of water to start with. Because of the mistake, we ended up using less water than we otherwise should have. Hopefully the only result is a slightly higher alcohol beer. The original gravity of 1.066 came in slightly above the recipe's 1.061, which would support that possibility.

The second mistake was with the mash temperature. Instead of heating the water hotter than the desired mash temperature (to a point called the strike temperature), I accidentally stopped heating the water when it reached mash temperature. This meant that after we put the grains in, the temperature dropped lower than the desired mash temperature. We just turned the heat back on and got the mash up to temperature. The only nerve wracking part was trying to avoid burning the bottom of the brew bag in the pot while the heat was on, but it appears to have made it out unscathed.

Using the wrong mash temperature, even just for a little while during the start of the mash, has the potential to mess up how much of the sugars in the mash get converted into sugars that the yeast can process. A reduction in consumable sugar would result in less attenuation in the beer, which would mean lower ABV despite the 1.066 starting gravity. Only time will tell to see what kind of final gravity we reach.

Speaking of time, the current plan is to go eight weeks from brew day to bottling. We fermented at about 55 degrees for just over two weeks, then gradually reduced the temperature to the low 40s where it will lager for the next four weeks or so. Unlike past lagers we've done, we're going to try skipping racking to a secondary for this beer and let it sit in the primary for the whole two months until bottling. There's a tipping point between letting the settled yeast continue to clean up the flavors in the beer after fermentation vs. the dead yeast and other trub starting to import their own off flavors. Two months might be pushing it, but hopefully we're still on the good side of that equation and end up with a great tasting Oktoberfest.