Fall Lagers
Can you smell it? It’s that particular smell. Seasons changing, leaves beginning to crisp, curl, and lose their fresh greenness. The air’s making promises and maybe the weather will follow suit. Autumn’s promise of chilly slumber lies thick in the breeze and naturally that makes us think of lagered beer that’s rich to sip and takes advantage of our longer nights and lowering temperatures.
The good news is despite the complicated rumors you’ve heard, the truth is that there’s not really a lot more — some would say any more — to fuss over than you do in a regular fermentation. It’s a straight-forward process with straight-forward results.
Remember malted barley wants to become beer lager!
Setting the stage
Let’s do the basic recap because that’s what all good teachers should do! The word lager simply means “to store” in German. That’s because the magic of lager is traditionally ascribed to a period of long cold storage. Think a cold ferment in the 50 °F (10 °C) range, followed by weeks or months at near freezing temps.
The yeasts that do well in those conditions given “proper” circumstances can produce exceptional beers with less residual sugar and a cleaner finish. Naturally, since we’re using German terms, we tend to think of the whole world of lagers being wrapped up in that area of Germany and the Czech Republic. No surprise that with their long cool seasons, they’ve developed a raft of beers to keep you warm. (No matter the opinions of some local writers who think anyone drinking anything other than helles is strange.)
Our Rules for Brewing a Good Fall Lager
1. Good malt and/or fresh extract
2. Water balanced to chloride for enhanced malt profile
3. Appropriate yeast choice
4. Appropriate yeast amount
5. Fermentation control
Unlike the hoppy beers that we seem to be downing by the fistfuls in modern craft times, a good fall lager is all about the malt. Remember that stuff? Requires you to steep it and provides the sugar yeast convert into alcohol — rumor has it that it can also add color, body, and odd aromas that don’t smell anything like pine, citrus, or tropical fruits. It’s time to break away from the exclusively pale malts!
It’s also time for you to really pay attention to your malt. When you walk into your local homebrew shop, you hopefully will be confronted with a plethora of options. In some stores the choice is mind bogglingly confounding. But here’s a simple rule — choose the best malt for the job. Ignore the price. Don’t try and calculate costs per pint. Choose the best tasting malt and for many of these styles, that’s going to be German malts. Denny likes the products of Best Malz, although these days he generally reaches for Mecca Grade Estate malt even for German styles. Depending on where you live, it can be difficult to get and that’s when the Best Malz is useful. Drew digs the flavors from Weyermann. Both are stalwarts of the German brewing world.
But what are you really looking for? You’re looking for flavor. Don’t be shy when you’re roaming around the shop. Make like a kid in a penny candy shop. Grab a couple of kernels and pop them in your mouth. Crunch them up and hold them there for a few seconds. You want to let the enzymes in your saliva attack the starches to create a small dose of sugar. It’s an imperfect test, but it gives you the basic idea about the grain. For most of our target styles, we’re looking for the deep toasty tones of Munich malt. We’re still following the modern trend of avoiding too many caramel/crystal malts because despite what we’ve been raised to think — malty is not the same as sweet. Extract brewers can find equivalents in this department as well. Don’t be afraid to use some Munich, Vienna, and Pilsen extract in the same recipe, like an all-grain brewer might.
On the water front, the most important thing you can approach in your water chemistry is to balance the inherent acidity of a roastier malt found in some of these styles. To counter higher acidity malts we recommend pickling lime. The traditionally-used calcium carbonate is less effective at pH adjustment due to its lower solubility. We also usually recommend some additional calcium chloride to boost the perception of the malt as well. As always, we suggest using a water profiler (we both use and recommend Bru’nwater) to make sure you’re hitting your levels correctly. As we always like to remind people — don’t get hung up on trying to perfectly replicate a purported Munich water profile. You can tie yourself into knots and actually make your beer worse by over doing it. Use a water profile based on the color and flavor of the beer as well as what you’re looking for in the final product. Extract brewers, remember that the maltster already did the water chemistry for you, so either very soft or reverse osmosis water is the best place to start. You can then make additions like calcium chloride if you so desire, but keep these additions small.
Now that you’ve got malt and water, you’ll need to combine them. Many traditional recipes call for using the laborious decoction method. Neither of us advocates it even if traditionalists will proclaim that it provides a bigger, richer malt character. We feel like the best reason to do a decoction mash is because you enjoy the process. We stick to a simple infusion mash schedule for our needs. (If you want to really try something crazy go read about Czech lager mashing schedules that virtually require brewers in shifts.)
For hops, the key thought is “kiss of.” Put away the fistfuls of hops we all throw into the kettle. Focus on the “noble” and noble-adjacent varieties. We like to bitter with a neutral hop like Magnum (because it makes life easy and the boil flavor impact is low) before switching to classics like Saaz, Spalt, Tettnang (in its various forms), Hallertauer, or noble-ish American hops like Willamette, Mt. Hood, Liberty, or Sterling. Focus on herbal and spicy characters. If you don’t have a neutral bittering hop like Magnum on hand, those latter hops can also be used for bittering.
For yeast, this one is both simple and complex — nearly any clean lager yeast will work. The flavors of lager yeasts are subtler, but some of them do have interesting behaviors. The workhorse of the lager world is the SafLager W-34/70 (see also Wyeast 2124/White Labs WLP830). It’s truly universal and nearly Drew proof. Others include the various “Munich/Oktoberfest” strains, which do require a diacetyl rest to complete fermentation. One of Drew’s absolute favorites is the White Labs WLP833 (German Bock) strain, which always makes for a booming malt character. Denny reaches for Wyeast 2206 (Bavarian Lager) in these brews. In the dry yeast world, SafLager S-189 is also a great strain (and trouble free!) for lagers that are really malt-forward.
Even a clean ale yeast strain works well. Denny has had great results making “pseudo lagers” with both Wyeast 1007 (German Ale) and 1056 (American Ale) strains. Both will ferment well in the mid to upper 50s °F (low teens °C) if you can manage that.
One place where you do need to pay attention to lagers is that you need more yeast than you do for ales. Don’t stress over yeast calculator numbers. We generally recommend that you make a starter that’s at least half again as big as your usual starter for a similar-sized ale. If you normally make 1-qt. (1-L) starter for your ales, make them 1.5 qts. (1.5 L) for your lagers.
As we’ve mentioned, lagers are traditionally fermented cool. Low- to mid-50s °F (low-10s °C) is pretty standard. There have been recent discoveries in yeast genetics that have shown linkages between ale and lager yeasts. Many yeasts that are thought of as lager strains actually have ale-yeast genetics. That means you have some wiggle room with several strains.
For example the Wyeast 2124 (Bohemian Lager), White Labs WLP830 (German Lager), and SafLager W-34/70 strains all work really well at higher temperatures than traditionally-fermented lagers. That comes in handy if you don’t have real fermentation temperature control. You still don’t want to go crazy and ferment them in the 70s °F (low 20s °C), but low- to mid-60s °F (high teens °C) works well. Just keep in mind that you’ll still have to have some way of lagering them after fermentation.
“Warm” Fermentation
As radical as it may seem to traditional lager brewers, you can make great lagers at higher temperatures than thought possible just a few years ago. Now, you don’t want to go high-temperature crazy like if you were using kveik yeast, but you don’t necessarily need to ferment in the 50s °F (10–15 °C) either. Denny has had great luck pitching both aforementioned (Wyeast 2124 or SafLager W-34/70) in the low- to mid-60s °F (high teens °C). Hold the fermentation at that temperature for a week or two, then raise the temperature to the low-70s °F (low-20s °C) to complete fermentation before crashing to 33–35 °F (0–2 °C) for conditioning/lagering. Hold that temperature for at least a week (more is better). You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can have a great lager ready to drink.
Fermenting outdoors in cold weather
If you’re one of the people who live where it gets cold in the winter (Drew has no idea what this means!), then you can do traditional lager fermentation outdoors. This is the way Denny made lagers for many years before getting a chest freezer and other means of temperature control. Put your fermenter in a large tub of water. Put a 50–100W aquarium heater in the water. You need to play around a bit with the thermostat on the heater in order to discover what water temperature relates to what fermenter temperature, but you get it figured out pretty quick. Denny even used a timer for the heater so it would only come on during the coldest parts of the day. In addition, should you need to cool your fermentation down you can simply add ice packs to the water. Inexpensive, effective, and above all, easy. Not as easy as a chest freezer, but several hundred dollars cheaper!
Ok, now you’ve all the pieces in place to brew a solid lager, so let’s talk a little about some of our favorite fall lager beer styles.
Our favorite fall lagers
Dunkel – A beautifully toasty dark lager with just enough malt to make you feel enveloped . . . but not overwhelmed. It’s the ideal showcase for great Munich malt. Some folks say it’s an old man’s beer and you should be enjoying a helles or Pils, but I’ll take a dunkel any day thank you very much.
Märzen – Yes, it’s called March beer, but in reality, this is the fall classic. Originally brewed strong as a way to get around the lack of summer brewing, Märzen has become inextricably intertwined with the Munich Oktoberfest. (Nevermind that at the fest these days they mostly drink a souped-up helles called festbier.) Amber in color when compared to dunkel’s darker tones, it’s actually fairly hearty. And it’s perfect for a liter at a time and a warm welcome to the fall.
Bock – Safe to say that no lager calls to mind fall and winter seasons as much as a bock. This is probably the one style of beer that would be hard to envision ever being “IPA-ified.” This is the essence of malt with just enough alcohol behind to be warming without being an overpoweringly boozy sugar bomb. Leave the doppelbock for the deepest darkest days of winter when you reach for a barleywine or Russian imperial stout. In other words, bock requires a deft threading of richness and drinking.
Old Man Dark
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.051 FG = 1.012
IBU = 20 SRM = 15 ABV = 5%
Ingredients
11 lbs. (5 kg) German dark Munich malt (10 °L)
2 oz. (57 g) Weyermann Carafa® Special II malt
3.75 AAU Magnum pellet hops (60 min.) (0.25 oz./7 g at 15% alpha acids)
2.25 AAU Tettnanger hops (20 min.) (0.5 oz./14 g at 4.5% alpha acids)
Wyeast 2124 (Bohemian Lager), White Labs WLP830 (German Lager), or SafLager W-34/70 yeast
3⁄4 cup corn sugar (if priming)
Step by Step
This is a single infusion mash. Heat 16.7 qts. (15.8 L) of water, add 1 tsp. of calcium chloride. Mash grains for 60 minutes at 152 °F (67 °C). Sparge with enough water to collect 6.5 gallons (25 L) of wort in the kettle. Bring wort to a boil and boil for 60 minutes, adding hops according to the recipe above. Add a kettle coagulant of your choice if you so desire.
After the boil is complete, give the wort a long stir to create a whirlpool and let settle for 10 minutes, then begin to chill. Bring down to yeast-pitching temperature, aerate the wort, and pitch the yeast.
Fermentation temperature can vary depending on your fermentation control. You can ferment from about 55–65 °F (13–18 °C). Ferment for 1–2 weeks at this temperature, Transfer to a secondary and lager for 1–4 weeks at 33–35 °F (0–2 °C). Bottle or force carbonate per normal.
Extract brewers: Swap out the dark Munich malt with 5.6 lbs. (2.5 kg) of Munich dried malt extract. Soak the crushed Carafa® in a small grain bag as the water heats up to a boil. Off heat, stir in the extract just prior to hitting a boil and stir until fully dissolved then bring the wort to a boil. Follow the remaining instructions from the all-grain recipe.
Drew’s March Beer
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.055 FG = 1.013
IBU = 21 SRM = 10 ABV = 5.5%
Ingredients
8.8 lbs. (4 kg) Weyermann Munich malt (6 °L)
3.3 lbs. (1.5 kg) Weyermann Pilsner malt
3.4 AAU Tettnanger pellet hops (first wort hop) (0.75 oz./21 g at 4.5% alpha acids)
1.6 AAU Hallertauer Hersbrucker pellet hops (40 min.) (0.3 oz./8.5 g at 4.5% alpha acids)
2.25 AAU Hallertauer Hersbrucker pellet hops (20 min.) (0.5 oz./14 g at 4.5% alpha acids)
Wyeast 2308 (Munich Lager), White Labs WLP820 (Oktoberfest/Märzen Lager), or Mangrove Jack’s M76 (Bavarian Lager) yeast
3⁄4 cup corn sugar (if priming)
Step by Step
This is a single infusion mash. Heat 18.2 qts. (17.2 L) of water, add 1 tsp. of calcium chloride. Mash grains for 60 minutes at 153 °F (67 °C). Sparge with enough water to collect 6.5 gallons (25 L) of wort in the kettle. Bring wort to a boil and boil for 60 minutes, add hops according to the recipe above. Add a kettle coagulant of your choice if you so desire.
After the boil is complete, give the wort a long stir to create a whirlpool and let settle for 10 minutes, then begin to chill. Bring down to yeast-pitching temperature, aerate the wort, and pitch the yeast. Ferment between 48–56 °F (9–14 °C). Ferment for 2 weeks at this temperature then raise temperature to low 70s °F (21–22 °C) and hold for 2 days. Transfer to a secondary and lager for 1–4 weeks at 33–35 °F (0–2 °C). Bottle or force carbonate per normal.
Extract brewers: Swap out the Munich and Pilsner malt with 4 lbs. (1.8 kg) of Munich dried malt extract and 2 lbs. (0.91 kg) of Pilsen dried malt extract. Heat water up towards a boil. Off heat, stir in the extract just prior to hitting a boil and stir until fully dissolved. Follow the remaining instructions from the all-grain recipe.
Respect the Goat Bock
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.063 FG = 1.015
IBU = 27 SRM = 14 ABV = 6.3%
Ingredients
13.5 lbs. (6.1 kg) Best Malz Best Munich malt
0.25 lb. (113 g) melanoidin malt
2 oz. (57 g) Weyermann Carafa® Special II malt
7.5 AAU Magnum pellet hops (60 min.) (0.5 oz./14 g at 15% alpha acids)
White Labs WLP833 (German Bock) or Wyeast 2206 (Bavarian Lager) or SafLager S-189 yeast
3⁄4 cup corn sugar (if priming)
Step by Step
This is a single infusion mash. Heat 20.8 qts. (19.7 L) of water, add 1 tsp. of calcium chloride. Mash grains for 60 minutes at 155 °F (68 °C). Sparge with enough water to collect 6.5 gallons (25 L) of wort in the kettle. Bring wort to a boil and boil for 60 minutes, add hops according to the recipe above. Add a kettle coagulant of your choice if you so desire.
After the boil is complete, give the wort a long stir to create a whirlpool and let settle for 10 minutes, then begin to chill. Bring down to yeast-pitching temperature, aerate the wort, and pitch the yeast. Ferment between 48–56 °F (9–14 °C). Ferment for 2 weeks at this temperature then raise temperature to low 70s °F (21–22 °C) and hold for 2 days. Transfer to a secondary and lager for 1–4 weeks at 33–35 °F (0–2 °C). Bottle or force carbonate per normal.
Extract brewers: Swap out the Munich malt with 6.8 lbs. (3.1 kg) of Munich dried malt extract. Soak the crushed melanoidin and Carafa® in a small grain bag as the water heats up to a boil. Off heat, stir in the extract just prior to hitting a boil and stir until fully dissolved. Follow the remaining instructions from the all-grain recipe.
