Hey guys,
As the title says, I'm about to take a crack at my first lager and have only a loose understanding of what I am doing and I was hoping someone on here could make fun of my ideas enough to point me in a slightly better direction.
I recently bought a Brew Jacket Immersion Cooler (link in case you've never heard of this contraption: http://www.brewjacket.com/) and per their claims, this thing can keep the temperature of the fermenter up to 35 degrees below ambient temp, and within .5 degrees of the target temperature - so pretty decent set up for lagering.
I also just bought an all grain kit (to lazy to set up my own recipe) from HomeBrewSupply.com for a Maibock (https://www.homebrewsupply.com/maibock-all-grain-recipe-kit.html) with a vial of WLP833 to drive the whole shebang. The expected OG of 1.068 obviously calls for building a decent sized starter, which I am not too well versed on either. I took a look at the calculator at brewer's friend and see that I will need a 2-stage starter to get my pitch rate up to snuff. While I'm aiming for a 5 gallon batch, I would use a 1.5L at 1.030, let it go a couple days, cool and decant it into a 3L starter at 1.030 - calc says that should get me to 476B cells.
The game plan for the mash would be 90 minutes at ~155-156 degrees, followed by a 90 minute boil - in this case I would be aiming to end up with about 4G at the end of the boil as my kitchen stove can't really get a full 6-6.5G boiling. I would then top off the amount of boiled wort with another gallon or so of pre-boiled water that had been cooled to about 40 degrees in a sanitized container. My immersion chiller can get the wort down to about 65 degrees, which I would then have the Brew Jacket cool the wort down to 45-46 before pitching and then letting the temp rise to 50 to ferment for a few days. I don't know exactly what a diacetyl rest should look like, but after 4-5 days when the gravity was getting close to the anticipated FG, I would crank the fermenter to the mid-60's over the course of 2 days before letting it rest for 3-4 more. Rack that into a second bucket to get the beer off the yeast cake and let that hang out at 40 for about a month.
Is there anything that I might be missing here? For the starter I don't have a stir plate, so I would just use the 'shaking method'. I think my sanitation practices are pretty solid as I haven't infected any batches just yet.
Thanks in advance for any advice, I appreciate all the insight.
As the title says, I'm about to take a crack at my first lager and have only a loose understanding of what I am doing and I was hoping someone on here could make fun of my ideas enough to point me in a slightly better direction.
I recently bought a Brew Jacket Immersion Cooler (link in case you've never heard of this contraption: http://www.brewjacket.com/) and per their claims, this thing can keep the temperature of the fermenter up to 35 degrees below ambient temp, and within .5 degrees of the target temperature - so pretty decent set up for lagering.
I also just bought an all grain kit (to lazy to set up my own recipe) from HomeBrewSupply.com for a Maibock (https://www.homebrewsupply.com/maibock-all-grain-recipe-kit.html) with a vial of WLP833 to drive the whole shebang. The expected OG of 1.068 obviously calls for building a decent sized starter, which I am not too well versed on either. I took a look at the calculator at brewer's friend and see that I will need a 2-stage starter to get my pitch rate up to snuff. While I'm aiming for a 5 gallon batch, I would use a 1.5L at 1.030, let it go a couple days, cool and decant it into a 3L starter at 1.030 - calc says that should get me to 476B cells.
The game plan for the mash would be 90 minutes at ~155-156 degrees, followed by a 90 minute boil - in this case I would be aiming to end up with about 4G at the end of the boil as my kitchen stove can't really get a full 6-6.5G boiling. I would then top off the amount of boiled wort with another gallon or so of pre-boiled water that had been cooled to about 40 degrees in a sanitized container. My immersion chiller can get the wort down to about 65 degrees, which I would then have the Brew Jacket cool the wort down to 45-46 before pitching and then letting the temp rise to 50 to ferment for a few days. I don't know exactly what a diacetyl rest should look like, but after 4-5 days when the gravity was getting close to the anticipated FG, I would crank the fermenter to the mid-60's over the course of 2 days before letting it rest for 3-4 more. Rack that into a second bucket to get the beer off the yeast cake and let that hang out at 40 for about a month.
Is there anything that I might be missing here? For the starter I don't have a stir plate, so I would just use the 'shaking method'. I think my sanitation practices are pretty solid as I haven't infected any batches just yet.
Thanks in advance for any advice, I appreciate all the insight.