One year ago I was in St. Louis with good friends and family tearing up the town for my bachelor party. One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to Urban Chestnut Brewing Company. A relatively new brewery on the St. Louis scene, they had an amazing line-up of old school european ales and lagers along with more popular american craft brews. One of the beers I enjoyed most was their Zwickel. Zwickel can be paralleled to (if not 'also known as') German kellerbier. It's young lager. Hazy, malty, yeast turbid, raunchy, young. All kinds of different and delicious flavors that are typically muted when a lager goes through a traditional lagering period. These beers are meant to be fresh and funky. I loved it.
I want to brew another batch of Muhleisen All Grain Double Decocted Oktoberfest again this year, but in order to do so I need loads of fresh healthy lager yeast. I couldn't think of a better way to build up a yeast culture than with a lower gravity Zwickel-style wort. Working off the ingredients provided by Urban Chestnut and also off the recipe from brewing legend Michael Dawson (linked here), I came up with this recipe (for 10 gallons):
16# German Pils
2# German Carahell
1# German Carafoam
128F for 20 minutes, 149F for 30 minutes, 158F for 30 minutes, 168F for 10 minutes.
1.5oz of 6.9%AA Tradition hop at 60 minutes (basically Hallertau)
0.5oz of 6.9%AA Tradition hop at 15 minutes
Target OG: 1.048
Target IBU: 20
My mash got all screwed up so my schedule was really like 132F for 20 minutes, 151 for 40 minutes, 154F for 20 minutes, straight to sparging. We will see what the result of this debacle is. Hopefully it doesn't cause another 'Debockle'.
For this batch I had to make a 1 gallon starter using 4 smack packs of WY2487 Hella-Bock yeast. I hit my gravity numbers and with the ground water still cold I was able to chill to 60F in 15 minutes with my JZ style immersion chiller. I could have gone colder but I wanted to pitch the yeast starter a little warm and once activity has taken off I will get it into a 50-55F fridge for primary.
This brew will not be lagered. In two weeks I'll keg it and rinse the yeast cake for the yeast I need for my Oktoberfest. As with all my brews, I can't wait to see how this one turns out!
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| I bought a new 'large-face' thermometer for my boil kettle. Just cuz. |
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| Mash. |
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| First runnings, you can see how short the thermometer stub is. Also the color of the wort. Also that awesome mash paddle. |
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| Another shot to see the color in hose. |
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| Sparging. |
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| This is my new 'graduated cylinder' for taking gravity measurements. My old tube gave out on me so I had to think on my feet. Footed pilsener glass just seemed fitting and it worked well. I like the color. |
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| BOIL. I collected a little too much pre-boil but that's because I got a better efficiency than expected. |
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| Hops. Smellin right. |
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| I really like this Spiedel fermentor. Makes life very easy with these 10 gallon batches I've been doing. I also bought an oxygenation system to step up my game. The red can is a disposable canister of O2 from Home depot ($10, should provide oxygen for at least 5 batches). I got the regulators, hosing, and stainless oxygenation stone (2 micron) from more beer. We will see what results it yields. |
In two weeks I will have a crazy Oktoberfest brew day. Hopefully it goes well. In about 4 weeks I'll be tapping into some young and hazy Zweet Zweet Zwickel.
