New to lagers

[jdahl10]

Hello,

I am a relatively new brewer (6 brews under my belt), and I'm planning to try my first lager. I live in a crappy college house so our heating isn't great and I've been having trouble keeping my fermenters at a constant and high temp (looking into fermentation heating setups) but for now I figure why not steer into the skid and brew a lager? Since I'm new, I am thinking about doing an IPL, so that the off flavor threshold is higher. I was hoping you fine brewers could give me some advice about lagers that I may not have gotten from my previous ale brews.

I'm thinking of dryhopping, so do you think that it would be best to do a secondary and dry hop in that?

How long does primary usually last? I've been reading about people having up to 3 weeks of primary.

Anything will be helpful. Wish me luck!

Cheers

 

[theheroguy]

https://byo.com/hops/item/2875-india-pale-lager-roundtable

This might help. I can't speak from experience really I've only done one lager and it was a helles. I did a primary for 4 months and only lagered for 2 weeks in secondary. It turned out clean and malty.

 

[Sailingeric]

My last lager I has in my primary for about 3 weeks and after d rest I cold crashed for about 2 weeks. I kegged about a month ago and now it is yummy and clear.

 

[BigMack]

What are your current ambient temps? If you use a lager yeast like 34/70 you can actually get the temp pretty high up there and still get a super clean beer out of it. I just used 34/70 for my Vienna Lager at just a hair under 60 degrees and it is incredibly clean and malty. If you can get it to 60 or under consistently I would say you could go with a malty lager rather than an IPL and be totally fine.

 

[millsbrew]

If you can't control temperature, I'd worry about a d-rest. Some say they aren't necessary, while others swear by them. I always do one for the handful of lagers I've done. If you really want to give it a shot, do a 2 week primary at 50f, try a heat wrap for 2 days to hit 60f. Then toss in a garage for sub-45f (or hopefully lower) temps for a month or 2. It's risky but not crazy. You can dry hop 5-7 days before bottling day.