International Pale Lager Something Like "Stella"

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I made this recipe up just before Xmas, finally got it on tap now. All I can say is WOW, this one is not going to last long! I did 60min saaz, 30 min cascade and 10min saaz. Lagered for two weeks, brought back for d-rest, racked then to the fridge for another few weeks. I will definitely make this again and again. Always had a soft spot for pilsners.
 
Drinking first pint of this recipe right now. :mug:

pretty close to the original!! I subbed out the hops though. I used

1.5 oz saaz @ 60 min
.5 oz hallertau @30
.5 oz hallertau @10

I have since switched to all-grain, but when i made this recipe I converted it to partial-mash. For those interested:

3.5 # Pilsner Malt
1.5 # 2-row
.5 # flaked corn
3 # light LME
 
When I made this recipe, my idea was to split the difference between a lager like Chezchvar or Stella Artois and an American style Lager like Budweiser and come up with a hybrid - something somewhere in between. Well as it turns out, this beer is a lot closer to Stella Artois than to an American Lager. In fact the taste resemblance to Stella Artois is uncanny - hence the name.

Anyway, other than the fact that this beer is quite a bit stronger than Stella, with regards to flavor and aroma its pretty close.

I imagine you'd get even closer if you left off the 2# of Rice Flakes in the recipe. Next time I make it I will likely omit the Rice. I don't think you really need it, I just put it in there because I was trying to go big without adding a lot of body - the rice adds a bit more alcohol which makes it quite a bit stronger but it stops me at the third glass. If you want something closer to Stella thats still a guzzler omit the rice.

Here's the ingredients:

Malts:
4.5 # Weyerman Pilsner 37PPG, 2L
4.5 # American 2 Row Lager 38PPG, 2L
2 # Flaked Rice ( optional )

Mashed at 147F for 90 minutes

Hops:
1 oz Sterling Leaf 6.7% AA @ 60 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 30 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 10 minutes

Very simple recipe, very easy to make, very nice results.


I would love to know how to brew this in 10 gallon batches. What starting volumes of water, water profile, etc?
 
First off, thanks for all the great insight everyone. I'm brewing this saturday and would love to clone Stella,,, So what hops do I use!? It looks like everything has been used here and I am not a hop expert, so can I get some feedback/recommendations?

Cheers!
 
First off, thanks for all the great insight everyone. I'm brewing this saturday and would love to clone Stella,,, So what hops do I use!? It looks like everything has been used here and I am not a hop expert, so can I get some feedback/recommendations?

Cheers!

Since the OP said the beer tasted a lot like Stella, why not use the hops he used?

Hops:
1 oz Sterling Leaf 6.7% AA @ 60 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 30 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 10 minutes
 
spark_plug said:
I made this recipe up just before Xmas, finally got it on tap now. All I can say is WOW, this one is not going to last long! I did 60min saaz, 30 min cascade and 10min saaz. Lagered for two weeks, brought back for d-rest, racked then to the fridge for another few weeks. I will definitely make this again and again. Always had a soft spot for pilsners.

If you don't mind me asking what is saaz and cascade? Hops?
 
Yes, Saaz and Cascade varieties of hop. The flavour of Saaz is what you'd expect from a good European pilsner, the flavour of Cascade is what you'd expect from a good California pale ale (think Sierra Nevada) just to give you a *very rough* approximation of the profiles.
 
Just got back into brewing with a friend. Decided to try and "do it up right"
We use a 16 gallon SS kettle, 2 10 gallon Igloos, transfer pumps, lager chamber made from a chest freezer with a Johnson controls temp controller, corny kegs with a plate filter and 10Lb Co2, SS 50' wort chiller, refractometer, etc...

Now all that being said, we decided to go with this recipe right off the bat. Which was probably pretty stupid. An IPA would probably have made more sense trying to get back into the swing of things.

I plugged this recipe into Beersmith and scaled it up to 10 Gallons. But immediately it appeared the numbers are off after doing so.

IBUs show as: 30.2
OG shows as: 1.052
SRM: 3.5
Est ABV: 5.9%

My profile is set as: Mash - Single infusion, Light Body, Batch Sparge
Carbonation - Keg
Fermentation - Three Stage

Thoughts on why and what to correct?


Step by Step

Started off with 12 gallons of water filtered though a 6-stage reverse osmosis water filtration system.
Our water testing kit all showed virtually no particulates, chlorine, etc. Perfect right?
We then added one campden tablet into our strike water.

Crushed the Pilsner Malt though the Cereal Killer - one pass
Grain looked good, didn't appear too fine

Steeped in the 10 Gallon Igloo at 148.00 for 75 minutes.
Drained and sparged with 168.00 water

Boiled the wort for 70 minutes - waited until the wort actually began boiling to begin marking time.

Added hops at 20 and 60 minutes plus a little extra at flame out. My friend likes his beer a little hoppy.

First big problem:

We used the 50' stainless steel wort chiller attached to the garden hose, but we also put the 20' of tubing into a 50 gallon ice bath for the return.

We didn't disturb the kettle in any way. We let the chiller sit and sit and sit. No matter what we did, the wort would not get below 100 degrees according to the thermometer built into the kettle. At this point I attempted to take a reading with the refractometer. I drained a little off through the built in spigot. No matter how many samples I took and which way I leaned into the sun, etc. I couldn't make heads or tails of the reading. I then drianed off some more and tried the Hydrometer which gave a reading of 1.024 Not good. The recipe says OG shouldbe 1.068 or thereabouts.

Finally, we decided to bring the kettle inside into our "beer lab" and give it a stir. Immediately the temperature dropped to 92-94. We waited for almost another hour with the lid on the kettle...still couldn't get below 90. Finally out of desperation we dumped a bag of ice into the kettle and stirred some more.

Soon as I began stirring the temp dropped down to 86, 84, 80, etc.

Then we poured off and filtered through the fine mesh in line filter into two 6.5 gallon carboys. At this point we pitched the 5 liter starter I made on the stir plate. We used dry yeast, but I had read for a lager that the number of cells to start with needed to be in the 300-500 billion range to get a good start. So I stir plated the dry yeast. Man that yeast practically exploded in the Erlenmeyer. Smelled good though :)

Our lager chest was at around 58 degrees when the two carboys went in. No activity for the first three days. Raised the temp up to 68 and boom overnight, the bubble locks are just boiling.

Put the carboys into the lager chest and checked on them every few days for a week and a half until we noticed the airlock activity had slowed to a crawl.
Took a gravity reading in the hyrdometer again. 1.010

That seemed to be a problem as it looked like it had already burned through everything, which may not have been much since we started with an OG that was apparently much lower than was called for. So we waited another week and then took a taste sample. The color was absolutely beautiful. Crystal clear but didn't really taste like beer, more like beer tea.

Sorry for the length I really just want to outline everything we did to the best of my recollection to see if someone might be able to help pinpoint all the areas where we screwed up.

Anywho...we transferred to two corny kegs and placed them back into the lager chest and began lowering the temp by 5 degrees every day until it his 38-40. Checked on the pressure in the kegs and they seemed to be building up pressure. We checked by using the pressure valve. After about another week and a half the pressure seems to have died off almost completely.

So here we are with this "beer" sitting in kegs in the lager freezer for about a month and a half. We plan on pulling them next week and cold filtering them through a plate filter into our other kegs and carbonating them.

We have no idea what we're going to end up with.

Thoughts, suggestions, criticisms...??

Attached is a PDF of our BeerSmith profile along with some poorly written notes.

View attachment Stella - Beersmith.pdf
 
Let us know how this turns out. I imagine a week of active fermenting to get a 1.02 makes beer.
My biggest concern is dumping the ice in the wort. The chiller can't just sit in the boil pot, you have to gently stir the wort with the chiller to distribute the temps. Basically the only wort being cooled is the liquid touching the chiller, so you have to stir.
 
Sorry, those numbers were off. I'll correct in my origanl post. The OG from the first reading was 1.024

The second reading in the hydrometer after a week in the primary was 1.010

Seems like we started nowhere near where the recipe called for in the beginning which is 1.068.
 
Sorry, those numbers were off. I'll correct in my origanl post. The OG from the first reading was 1.024

The second reading in the hydrometer after a week in the primary was 1.010

Seems like we started nowhere near where the recipe called for in the beginning which is 1.068.

Wait, what temperature was the wort when you did that hydro reading? Also pilsner malt should be boiled for minimum of 90 minutes to drive off the DMS.
 
WildTex said:
Let us know how this turns out. I imagine a week of active fermenting to get a 1.02 makes beer.
My biggest concern is dumping the ice in the wort. The chiller can't just sit in the boil pot, you have to gently stir the wort with the chiller to distribute the temps. Basically the only wort being cooled is the liquid touching the chiller, so you have to stir.

Well, actually.... :)

that depends on your chiller. Many modern chillers are constructed in such a way that it allows for chilling to take place without stirring. I use a plate chiller myself but used to have a MoreBeer super chiller that positions the coils in the upper part of the wort and allows for significant movement of wort without stirring.

I don't think he was putting ice in his wort, though.
 
handp said:
Sorry, those numbers were off. I'll correct in my origanl post. The OG from the first reading was 1.024

The second reading in the hydrometer after a week in the primary was 1.010

Seems like we started nowhere near where the recipe called for in the beginning which is 1.068.

1.024 instead of 1.068 sounds like about 25% efficiency off the top of my head. That looks like a serious red flag. I feel bad even asking some of these questions...

Is it possible you tried to brew 10 gallons with a 5 gallon recipe? Was your mash temp anywhere near your goal?

I am having a hard time imagining that level of extraction with highly modified malts.

It sounds like you've got a great setup, it's just a matter of dialing in its particularities.
 
handp, post your recipe so we can help you figure out what happened. I also recommend brewing software like beersmith where it can print out a brew process sheet to help you do everything step by step with the correct volumes of water, correct temps, etc.
 
bmason1623 said:
I'm wondering if he confused the strike water temp with the mash temp?

That's a possibility. If you throw a wodge of grain into 148° water, you might well drop below the temps needed for α or β amylase.
 
I love Stella...............

but for what everyone says is such a simple recipe it sure sounds like a very complex one.

bumping... want to hear perfection for me to pursue.
 
I love Stella...............



but for what everyone says is such a simple recipe it sure sounds like a very complex one.



bumping... want to hear perfection for me to pursue.


Looking at the original recipe the grain bill is just 2 row and pilsner, maybe some rice if you want. I think that's what people mean when they call it simple; no "character" or high colour malts.


Sent from my Rotary Phone using Magic.
 
I love Stella...............

but for what everyone says is such a simple recipe it sure sounds like a very complex one.

bumping... want to hear perfection for me to pursue.

This recipe is super easy, I've done it or similar around 6 times now. The one variation I did that produced one of the best pilsners yet was a 90 minute boil with Hallertau Tradition for bittering, and then hit real hard with about 5 oz of Saaz over the final 30 minutes. Recipe adjusted for 6% abv, and I used some corn sugar late in the boil to get a good ferment. 10gal keg full literally disappeared.

Mashing means a fair bit here as well, I prefer on recipes like this to mash lower and longer, 90 minutes minimum if you like your beer dry. (149/150F but wouldn't go much higher.) I've mashed this recipe for 4 hours and was able to get 1.006 as a final reading.
 
OK, It appears as though some folks didn't actually take the time to read my entire diatribe regarding our initial attempts at this recipe in a 10 Gallon All Grain. Which I understand completely, it was really really long...

So...here goes again.

We have Beersmith. We scaled the recipe to 10 gallon all grain.

Our two biggest mistakes were not stirring the wort after the boil and dumping in the bag of ice. Our hydrometer reading was low for very good reasons. We made some very stupid rookie mistakes that ended up in us creating a beer that was absolutely gorgeous to look at....ridiculously crystal clear even with no filtering, irish moss or isenglass, with a beautiful head on it....but with absolutely no flavor or alcohol in it. It was pretty much beer tea.

The funny thing about homebrewing is...no matter how many books you read or forums posts or dvds you watch, everybody seems to leave out a little bit of information along the way. Everybody from the masters to the amateur homebrewer with an opinion harps and yells about things like sanitation, ferment temps, grain and yeast profiles on and on and on....

Yet noone including John palmer for instance takes the time to touch on the very very basics. Things like gently stir the wort with your wort chiller to bring the temp down quickly....well how fast is too fast? Is there such a thing as chilling it too quickly? Everything i've read points to getting it down below 75 as quickly as you can.

What about reading the hydrometer? What do all the little lines mean? How do you read a brix meter properly? What do you do if the readings are off...how can you correct it? It's little things like this that you never really get much discussion of that leads to stupid little mistakes.

Our last go round...we hit all our numbers perfectly. Got the wort chilled in 12-15 minutes...got active fermentation right out of the gate etc. But we switched to an ESB, we'll be doing the Stella Clone again in a month and i'll report back on the outcome of that one.
 
What is the vole used for boil water in mash and for spathe water for this recipe? Thanks!
 
What is the volume used for boil water in mash and for sparge water for this recipe? Autocorrect got me - sorry :) Thanks!
 
When I made this recipe, my idea was to split the difference between a lager like Chezchvar or Stella Artois and an American style Lager like Budweiser and come up with a hybrid - something somewhere in between. Well as it turns out, this beer is a lot closer to Stella Artois than to an American Lager. In fact the taste resemblance to Stella Artois is uncanny - hence the name.

Anyway, other than the fact that this beer is quite a bit stronger than Stella, with regards to flavor and aroma its pretty close.

I imagine you'd get even closer if you left off the 2# of Rice Flakes in the recipe. Next time I make it I will likely omit the Rice. I don't think you really need it, I just put it in there because I was trying to go big without adding a lot of body - the rice adds a bit more alcohol which makes it quite a bit stronger but it stops me at the third glass. If you want something closer to Stella thats still a guzzler omit the rice.

Here's the ingredients:

Malts:
4.5 # Weyerman Pilsner 37PPG, 2L
4.5 # American 2 Row Lager 38PPG, 2L
2 # Flaked Rice ( optional )

Mashed at 147F for 90 minutes

Hops:
1 oz Sterling Leaf 6.7% AA @ 60 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 30 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 10 minutes

Very simple recipe, very easy to make, very nice results.

Did you ever make it without the rice flakes? How did it turn out? Any other adjustments?
 
Is the secondary for two weeks necessary? Mine has gone down to 1.008 after two weeks in primary and a 4 day d rest. I'm thinking of just going right to lagering now.
 
When I made this recipe, my idea was to split the difference between a lager like Chezchvar or Stella Artois and an American style Lager like Budweiser and come up with a hybrid - something somewhere in between. Well as it turns out, this beer is a lot closer to Stella Artois than to an American Lager. In fact the taste resemblance to Stella Artois is uncanny - hence the name.

Anyway, other than the fact that this beer is quite a bit stronger than Stella, with regards to flavor and aroma its pretty close.

I imagine you'd get even closer if you left off the 2# of Rice Flakes in the recipe. Next time I make it I will likely omit the Rice. I don't think you really need it, I just put it in there because I was trying to go big without adding a lot of body - the rice adds a bit more alcohol which makes it quite a bit stronger but it stops me at the third glass. If you want something closer to Stella thats still a guzzler omit the rice.

Here's the ingredients:

Malts:
4.5 # Weyerman Pilsner 37PPG, 2L
4.5 # American 2 Row Lager 38PPG, 2L
2 # Flaked Rice ( optional )

Mashed at 147F for 90 minutes

Hops:
1 oz Sterling Leaf 6.7% AA @ 60 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 30 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 10 minutes

Very simple recipe, very easy to make, very nice results.

Hi, I'm new to brewing. But could someone please explain to me something about the Hops part, specifically about the time I'm adding these hops while boiling the wort.
 
Hi, I'm new to brewing. But could someone please explain to me something about the Hops part, specifically about the time I'm adding these hops while boiling the wort.

Sure, generally you are boiling wort for 60-90 minutes. So when you see in a recipe:


Hops:
1 oz Sterling Leaf 6.7% AA @ 60 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 30 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 10 minutes

You add 1 ounce of sterling hops at 60 minutes or beginning of the boil.

1/2 ounce of Liberty hops 30 minutes left in the boil

1/2 ounce of Liberty hops with 10 minutes left in the boil.

The traditional method of adding hops is to do it through out the boil however as time goes on things are changing so many people now are adding the majority of their hops towards The end of the boil.
 
That's super man. Thanks.

Some more things, is there any substitute for the yeast W34/70 for slightly warmer temperatures AND can fermentation be done in the refrigerator?
 
That's super man. Thanks.

Some more things, is there any substitute for the yeast W34/70 for slightly warmer temperatures AND can fermentation be done in the refrigerator?

34/70 is pretty much the best lager yeast to use at warmer temperatures...people have successfully used it at 66° with no fermentation issues.

No, fermentation cannot be done in the refrigerator...unless you have it hooked up to a temp controler. Most fridges I believe at set to 40° F...which is too cold for lager yeast.
 
When I made this recipe, my idea was to split the difference between a lager like Chezchvar or Stella Artois and an American style Lager like Budweiser and come up with a hybrid - something somewhere in between. Well as it turns out, this beer is a lot closer to Stella Artois than to an American Lager. In fact the taste resemblance to Stella Artois is uncanny - hence the name.

Anyway, other than the fact that this beer is quite a bit stronger than Stella, with regards to flavor and aroma its pretty close.

I imagine you'd get even closer if you left off the 2# of Rice Flakes in the recipe. Next time I make it I will likely omit the Rice. I don't think you really need it, I just put it in there because I was trying to go big without adding a lot of body - the rice adds a bit more alcohol which makes it quite a bit stronger but it stops me at the third glass. If you want something closer to Stella thats still a guzzler omit the rice.

Here's the ingredients:

Malts:
4.5 # Weyerman Pilsner 37PPG, 2L
4.5 # American 2 Row Lager 38PPG, 2L
2 # Flaked Rice ( optional )

Mashed at 147F for 90 minutes

Hops:
1 oz Sterling Leaf 6.7% AA @ 60 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 30 minutes
1/2 oz Liberty Pellets @ 10 minutes

Very simple recipe, very easy to make, very nice results.
Can you respond what the water quality was like when you brew this? I'm in Michigan where the water is pretty hard. If you can even specify the city where the water comes from, that would assist.
 
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