2025 Homebrew Project

I mentioned in a recent post that I decided to make 2024 the year when I finally started making homebrew lagers properly. As such, I bought a chest freezer to be my fermentation and lagering chamber, I got to grips with rudimentary decoction mashing, and I learnt an awful lot about the importance of getting your beer off the trub if you don't want your lager to have a soapy character. As a result of all this, some of the best beers I have ever made were lagers I brewed last year, brews that looked like this:

Overall, last year I brewed 2 batches each of pale kellerbier and Vienna lager, and single batch each of a German pilsner and a 14° Světlý Speciál. Mostly I used a single decoction approach, where the decoction raises the temperature from a saccharification rest to mash out, and they were my favourite brewdays.

Now that lager brewing is a regular part of my homebrew world, I have decided that I want to make my main brewing project for this year to be starting to develop a house lager that will be brewed to the same recipe multiple times a year. I already have a house best bitter that I brew several times each year with a nailed down recipe, and now I want to do the same with a lager.

Where to start though. Being a "house" lager, it could be something a little stronger than I normally drink in the pub - after all, I will be drinking it at home, and if I ever get it in my head to drive home from home, well I need help then. At the same time, in 2023 I wrote a post about how the notion of a "house" beverage being the highest expression of those making it, so I wanted to make my perfect lager.

It would have been all too easy for me to just say that my perfect beer is a Czech style 10° pale lager, but that wouldn't be a fully honest reflection of my tastes. Yes I love Saaz, but I love Tettnang, Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, and Perle just as much. I also love styles like Vienna lager, Helles, and Dunkel, oh and I have made a personal commitment to use my local maltster's, Murphy & Rude, products as much as possible.

So when it come to recipe development, I worked backwards from a starting gravity of 11° and knowing I wanted between 25 and 30 IBUs to the iteration of the beer I brewed on Sunday:

• 88% Virginia Pils
• 12% Vienna
• 20.2 IBUs of Hallertauer Mittelfrüh at 60 minutes
• 7.5 IBUs of Hallertauer Mittelfrüh at 15 minutes
• 0.7 IBU of Hallertauer Mittelfrüh at 1 minute
• Saflager W-34/70

Beyond the 11° starting gravity, which I hit bang on, this should give me a beer which is 4.2% abv with a colour of 3.7 SRM, putting it in the straw end of the spectrum, though I am not sure how the brewing software accounts for the Maillard reactions of a decoction mash.

My plan is to brew variants of this beer on the first weekend of each quarter this year, and for 2025 at least to swap out the yeast strain for each brew before tinkering with grain and hops next year in order to really nail down my recipe. Hopefully I will be able to source some TUM-35 for one of those brewdays, but I am planning to at least try S-189 in one of the batches, and maybe the fabled Pilsner Urquell H strain as well.

Each batch will be lagered for 4 weeks before being slowly carbed for a couple of weeks ahead of tapping, which may mean I need another CO2 bottle and regulator to do that in the chest freezer.

My gut feeling is that this batch will be good, but my goal is to have a house lager that I can brew as consistently as I do with my house best bitter.