Doppelbock Brew Day

Today we brewed our second lager - a doppelbock we're hoping to have ready in time for Christmas. Amy found the recipe in a recent issue of Zymurgy and she's been wanting to brew a doppelbock since all the way back in our Flying Barrel brew-on-premises days.

As with the oktoberfest, Annapolis Home Brew didn't have our primary choice for yeast. Instead of rolling with an alternative, this time we went to Maryland Home Brew to pick up a vial of White Labs WLP833 German Bock Lager yeast. As it turns out - I actually should have bought two. Lager ideal pitch rates are a lot higher than ales, and with this being a big lager (target starting gravity of 1.096), we would have needed a 2.5L starter to get the 443B cells we wanted. With only a 2L Erlenmeyer flask and one vial of yeast, we had to boost the starter gravity to 1.046 to have the calculations point to the right number of yeast from the starter. The small starter also led to me accidentally letting the starter boil over, despite using fermcap. We're definitely planning to get a 5L Erlenmeyer flask for next time.

For whatever reason, the starter didn't attenuate as much as it should have. It only reached a final gravity of 1.025 when I would have expected it to reach something more like 1.013. Unfortunately, we don't know whether this was a problem with the yeast or something we did with the starter. It could have been something as simple as not giving it enough time or not having the stir plate set up correctly. Since we were brewing on a Sunday morning too, we couldn't just go to the home brew store and pick up a fresh vial of the same strain of yeast. We decided to just roll with the yeast from the starter, but we're going to be closely monitoring the primary fermentation to make sure the yeast is doing okay.

During the brew day, we encountered a few minor issues but nothing serious. The volume of water after the mash was only about 4.8G instead of 5, indicating there was more grain absorption than BeerSmith had calculated. We also ended up only at 1.086 original gravity instead - not sure if there was an issue with the efficiency of the mash or if it was just down to differences in the ingredients compared to BeerSmith's numbers.

Despite those issues though, we're still excited to have finally brewed a doppelbock. Eight hours after brew day and happily we already have good krausen and the airlock is bubbling. Plus with our first lager seeming to turn out well so far, we're very optimistic for another delicious beer!