Lagering in a garage

[BernhardBrauer]

First post on the forum. Thanks for all the helpful tips and advice.

I recently moved to a new house and noticed the attached garage remains consistently in the 50s even with the recent cold snap the week prior. I was wondering if this would be suitable for lagering a maibock? My plan is to build a keezer/lagering chamber eventually but I probably won’t be able to get to it until after the new year.

I have been brewing for about a year now and I was successful in doing an ofest this past fall by using my ferm chamber for lagering. I don’t want to tie this up for two months however since I need to establish my pipeline again at the new place.

any thoughts or help would be appreciated

 

[Jag75]

Heck if it's always in low 50's go for it. You may want to hook up a fermwrap with an inkbird so you can bring the temp up slowly towards the end of fermentation.

 

[madscientist451]

Your garage temperature is pretty good for fermenting a lager, colder temperatures are better for cold conditioning your lager beer. Build a simple box with insulation board and use frozen 2 liter water bottles; with your 50F garage temps, you should be able to maintain 40F or lower by changing out the frozen water bottles every day or so.

 

[Pappers_]

There are two different temps and steps for lagers - lager fermentation (which it sounds like your garage might be good for, especially if its at the low end of the 50s) and lagering (which is cold aging, and your garage is not really cold enough for that - you want to get it down to the low 30s if possible).

 

[CTS]

I would go for it, that's how I made a few lagers before I got a fermentation fridge.

 

[BernhardBrauer]

Thanks for the responses. I have a fermentation chamber set up so fermenting isn’t a problem. I just don’t want to tie that up for a long period cold conditioning as well. I think I’ll either try as an experiment or maybe wait until it is consistently colder outside and hopefully the garage temp will stay in the 40s. Otherwise this batch will have to wait until the keezer gets built.

thanks