Bitter Pils To Swallow

Homegrown Mt. Hood hops.

It's Pilsner time. In fact, it might be late for Pilsner time. But I made one anyway, because my wife likes 'em, and because I don't know how else to get rid of all these Mt. Hood hops I grew last year. A friend of mine had asked me if I'd ever tried Firestone Walker's Hoppy Pils. I hadn't, but it sounded like fun. I threw together a recipe assuming about 4.5% alpha acids on my homegrown hops. If the beer winds up too bitter, well, I warned you, right? It's in the name. This is a Bitter Pils To Swallow.

I get intimidated when it's time to brew a lager, because for 11 gallons (the amount that makes it to the fermentor), I always need so much yeast. I thought about using dry yeast for this one, but the dry equivalent, Saflager W-34/70 is not really any cheaper, and I'd still need multiple satchets. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do when I finally make a high-gravity lager like a doppelbock or a Baltic porter. For this I made a two-step starter over the course of about 5 days.

Lager means big yeast starter.

Bitter Pils To Swallow

Batch size: 12 gallons
Expected efficiency: 75%
Target OG: 1.049
Target FG: 1.012
Color: 3 SRM 

Grist:

• 18# Pilsner Malt
• 2.5# Light Munich Malt
• 11 oz. Carapils

Mash:

• Saccharification - 148°F for 90'
• Mash out - 170°F for 10'

Boil: 90 minutes total

• 4 oz. Mt. Hood (leaf, ??% aa) at 60' to ?? IBU
• 3 oz. Mt. Hood (leaf, ??% aa) at 20' to ?? IBU
• 3 oz. Mt. Hood (leaf, ??% aa) at 5' to ?? IBU

Fermentation:

• Chill to 50°F, pitch Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager
• After one week, gradually raise to 57°F over 5 days
• Free-rise to 65°F for 2-day diacetyl rest
• Rack off the trub and crash-cool to 35°F, add some Biofine Clear
• Lager 8+ weeks at 35°F

For some reason, when I formulated the recipe, I forgot to target an 80% efficiency, which is about what I've been getting lately. As such, I overshot the gravity by about 6 points. No big deal there—by targetting the higher end of the IBU range for the style, I also protected myself against this eventuality. What I wasn't prepared for was just how voluminous 10 ounces of whole leaf hops would be. I had trouble fitting them in the hop spider and resorted to mixing things around very frequently to try to get as much liquid flow as possible. In the future, I may just throw the whole leaf hops full on into the boil and try to scoop them out before chilling—they just seemed too cramped in the hop spider.

That's a lot of hops.

One thing you may have noticed in the recipe is the 90-minute boil. With such a large proportion of Pilsner malt, you might want to do an extended boil to minimize the amount of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) in the finished beer. DMS can make your beer taste like cooked cabbage or creamed corn. Pilsner malt seems to lead to more DMS production than other malts, due to high levels of the precursor (S-methylmethionine) in the malt. Because DMS is quite volatile, it will boil off easily. Once you're done boiling, you want to chill the wort rapidly, because DMS is still produced in hot wort and once you stop boiling, it doesn't have a chance to escape. If you're ever curious what DMS tastes like, just buy yourself some Rolling Rock. It has a level of DMS well above the taste threshold.

Overshot the gravity a bit.

In the end, I almost forgot about the beer due to leaving it in my chest freezer to cool to pitching temps. Fortunately, I remembered right before I went to bed, ran down to my basement, oxygenated, and pitched the yeast.