Beer Styles, Technique

Optimizing a Hefeweizen Mash for Esters and Phenols

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A few days ago, I had the idea that I wanted to brew a classic Hefeweizen. In my few years of homebrewing, I had actualy only ever done a “proper” Hefeweizen once, and it was the “Almtaler Hefeweisse” kit from Hopfen&Malz. I wasn’t overly impressed by the specific beer, it seemed a bit too watery for my taste. But then, that may have been purely because it was my third beer that I ever brewed. After that, I brewed two more Hefeweizen, but both with a twist, i.e. a heavy late aroma hopping, followed by some dry-hopping with Nelson Sauvin. That beer was a success, but it’s definitely not your classic Hefeweizen.

A Bavarian Hefeweizen has some specific properties: it’s brewed from a mix of barley malt and wheat malt, with the wheat being at least 50% of the grist. Some commercial examples even contain as much as 70% wheat malt. The beer is cloudy, both from proteins from the wheat malt and yeast in suspension, and while pale, it’s usually a tad darker than your German pale lager, sometimes even going towards a reddish hue. Hop bitterness is very low, with no hop aroma. Alcohol-wise, the typical commercial examples usually have 4.8 to 5.5% ABV. The yeast strains used for that style are top-fermenting. Historically, Hefeweizen did not conform to the Bavarian Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) because it contains wheat malt, while the Reinheitsgebot only allows barley malt. Special permits were instead issued to those who held the privilege to brew with wheat.

Because I wanted to brew a Hefeweizen on a rather short notice, I went to Bierlieb and got some ingredients. Their choice in ingredients is alright but not great, but definitely enough for quite a few German beer styles, your odd IPA or Belgian-style beer. Unfortunately, they only offer dry yeasts, so I had to get WB-06. Now, the thing is that I’ve heard quite a few bad things about WB-06, namely that it’s a rather bland yeast that produces only tiny amounts of the typical phenolic and ester notes of a proper Hefeweizen. My previous experience with dry yeasts in general and specifically Fermentis dry yeast has been rather good so far (S-04 is my standard for most British styles, US-05 is the Chico strain and so probably the standard for almost everyone’s American styles, and Saflager W-34/70 and S-23 have worked for me in the past, too), so I wanted to give them a try nevertheless.

Just to be sure that I would definitely get enough phenolic (clove) and ester (banana) notes in my Hefeweizen, I was looking for a way to optimize my wort production to provide the yeast with as much of the precursors as possible.

For the clove notes, that’s relatively easy. The phenolic clove notes in Hefeweizen come from the specific yeast strains metabolizing free ferulic acid to 4-vinyl guaiacol. Ferulic acid is in the malt itself, but it needs to be freed and available in the wort. That is usually done through a ferulic acid rest, at about 45 °C.

The banana notes on the other hand are esters, iso-amyl acetate and ethyl acetate, and their production by the yeast directly correlates to the amount of glucose in the wort. So obviously, I’d need to do a mash in a way to increase the amount of glucose. Fortunately, there is a pretty cool method for that, the Herrmann method, or Herrmann-Verfahren in German. It is named after Markus Herrmann who wrote his doctoral thesis at Weihenstephan about the formation and influence of flavouring substances in wheat beer about a decade ago (sorry, German only!).

The principle behind the Herrmann-Verfahren is relatively easy: malt contains a number of enzymes which manipulate starches and complex sugars at specific temperatures. The most important ones are alpha- and beta-amylase that do most of the work. But there is another enzyme, maltase, which can break down maltose into glucose. Unfortunately, maltase works at about 45 °C, and is quickly denatured at higher temperatures. So Herrmann designed a mash schedule that first produces a good amount of maltose through a straightforward Hochkurz infusion mash, with 60% of the grist. Then, a second mash with the remaining 40% of the grist and cold water is done, which is then added to the first mash, bringing it down to 45 °C. That way, the maltase enzymes from the second mash can munch on the maltose produced by the first mash and create more glucose. After that mash, a second dextrinization rest is conducted, followed by mash-out.

The whole process is illustrated here:

Herrmann-Verfahren

That way, you end up with a wort with a lot higher amount of glucose, eventually leading to more esters after fermentation with the right yeast strain. Coincidentally, the 45 °C of the maltase rest is the same temperature that is also necessary for the ferulic acid rest.

The recipe that I came up with for my Hefeweizen looks like this:

Grist:

  • 66.6% Pale Wheat malt
  • 18.5% Pilsner malt
  • 9.3% Munich malt (dark)
  • 5.6% CaraMunich II

Hops:

  • 0.5 g/l Hallertauer Tradition (7% AA) first wort hopping
  • 0.25 g/l Hallertauer Mittelfrüh (3% AA) @ 20 min

60 minute boil. 10 IBU. Mash as described above. WB-06 yeast. OG 13.25 °P. For carbonation, I’m using about 7.5% of the wort as Speise.

For fermentation itself, I’m chilling the wort down to about 17 °C, then I’ll pitch the yeast, and will let the temperature freely rise to ambient temperature (about 23 °C in my flat at the moment). Fermentis recommends for the WB-06 yeast to keep a temperature below 22 °C for clove flavors and above 23 °C for banana flavors. Given that my wort provides the yeast with enough glucose and ferulic acid to actually produce either flavors above the perception threshold, I should be fine with that fermentation schedule to achieve a hopefully balanced Hefeweizen with all the right aromas and flavors and none of the wrong ones.

As soon as the beer is finished, I’ll report back about the results.

Recipes

Berlin Homebrewing Competition 2015: My English Brown Ale Recipe

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As mentioned in my previous article about my results at the Berlin Homebrewing competition 2015, I’m publishing the recipe to my best-performing beer, the English Brown Ale that I submitted to the Brown Ale, Porter, Stout category.

This beer was the first one that I designed for that competition, and since it was announced early that the overall winner would be brewed by Berlin microbrewery, I actually designed the beer to be not contain any too exotic malts or other ingredients, as this could theoretically have been a show-stopper for realizing the recipe at a larger recipe that doesn’t have a malt storage as well-sorted as a homebrewing store. So, that’s what it looks like:

Grist:

  • 67 % Pale Ale Malt
  • 21 % Munich Malt (dark)
  • 11 % CaraAroma
  • 1 % Chocolate Malt

Hops:

  • 1.5 g/l East Kent Goldings (5.8 % AA) @ 60 min
  • 0.75 g/l East Kent Goldings (5.8 % AA) @ 15 min

60 minute mash at 69 °C, then a 60 minute boil. S-04 yeast. OG was 12 °P, FG was 3 °P. 4.8 % ABV. 26 IBU.

The recipe actually went through some refining. The previous version contained only half the amount of Munich malt, only 8.5 % CaraAroma, and a tiny bit more Chocolate Malt. And even the first version is based off another recipe that I had brewed in early 2014, an English Dark Mild, which consisted of 87% Mild Ale malt, 11.5 % CaraAroma and 1.5 % Black Malt. The mix of Pale Ale and Munich Malt is something that I conceived to get a nuttier character into the base malt instead of just plain German-produced Pale Ale Malt. But I think in total, the idea of the dark mild showed through in the brown ale, which in some ways make the latter mostly a bigger version of the former. And I think the end result was definitely pleasant.

Events

Berlin Homebrewing Competiton 2015: Results

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Last Thursday, the results of this year’s Berlin homebrewing competition were announced. You can find the winners on the competition website. Congratulations to all the category winners, and especially so to the overall winner, Jörg Schloemer, whose beer “Vienna Calling” will be brewed by Heidenpeters later this year!

Many thanks also go out to Rory, who organized the whole competition to make homebrewing more visible and promote it in Berlin.

I did not win, but of my three submissions, one was particularly well-received by the judges, one showed flaws in the fermentation process of that particular batch, and one… well, judging from the comments, I think half of the judges didn’t fully grasp the beer style. I hold no grudges, though, as this was nevertheless some very valuable feedback.

The beer that got a relatively good score was my English Brown Ale. What I nevertheless found interesting was how differently it was perceived. One judge commented about it as “fizzy”, another one “could be more carbonated”, the third one “CO2 is right”. The average score was 80 of 100 points (note to American readers: this competition was not judged to BJCP standards), and this also reflects in the drinkability score, where it reached a consistent 24 of 30 points by all judges. One judge noticed a very light cardboard flavour, hinting at some minor oxidation issue. This is definitely something where I need to take a closer look at how I bottle my beer.

My second best beer was my Bohemian Pilsner. The scores for that by the four judges were all over the board, with two judges giving it 74 resp. 80 points, while one only gave it 34 points, and one 54 points. One major criticism was lack of head retention and lack of carbonation, which I pretty much expected upfront. We had kegged the beer, and when we bottled the beer, we noticed that we actually didn’t have quite enough beer to fill 4 500ml bottles to submit the beer! So we had to improvise, and I got 4 330ml bottles from the corner shop, poured out the beer, and filled in our beer instead. And even to fill these bottles, we had to underfill them a bit. So of course, if you’re dealing with pouring beer around and through funnels and what not, it will lose quite a bit of fizz.

Diacetyl, a very common (but not absolutely necessary) element of Bohemian Pilsners, was the most controversial part in the judging of this beer: one judge commended on the “nice diacetyl note”, one noted “light diacetyl”, and one noticed diacetyl as an off-flavour. I disagree with the last one, because, as I mentioned, it’s a common element of Bohemian Pilsners. The prototypical Pilsner, Pilsner Urquell, is a shining example for exactly that, especially so when served in a tank bar, or unfiltered and unpasteurized from cask. Besides that, one judge thought they’d get a flavour of cinnamon, which I absolutely don’t get, and also “far too slick mouthfeel”. Maybe from the diacetyl? Nevermind.

Finally, my American Pale Ale. This was really more of an afterthought, I put together the recipe on a relatively short notice, and also used that as an opportunity to use up hop scraps from previous brews. One theme that shows through most of the five judgings was that (1) the beer was too bitter, and a harsh bitterness, even, and (2) chlorophenolic notes. This was later explained to me by one of judges as most likely coming from the Berlin water being treated with chloramine and a fermentation that was slightly too hot. It’s definitely worth noting, and makes me think that I should probably do a better temperature control even with top-fermented beers. It’s also kind of sad that the Berlin water has to be treated like that, but we need to work with what we’re given. I definitely won’t start buying distilled water and then create water profiles by adding different salts.

All in all, it was a fun event, I enjoyed developing recipes for it and then brewing them, and we got some very valuable feedback. I’ll post the recipe of my English Brown Ale soon, and explain more about it.

Brewing

Vienna Lager: the Aftermath

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The result.
The result.

As blogged previously, I had looked a bit into the historic roots of Vienna lager, a beer style that was quite successful in the 19th century in Europe, but has since then been forgotten in its country of origin, and had only been revived through the US craft beer movement.

In April, I finally managed to brew the beer, and it fermented and matured in the weeks afterwards. It’s been lagering for a while, but a few weeks ago, it was finally ready and also finished carbonating (I had kegged the beer and force-carbonated it). The end result is a good, quaffable lager at 5% ABV, though a bit rough around the edges.

What I do like about the beer is that it just puts the intense maltiness of Vienna malt in the foreground, accentuated by a bit of residual sweetness due to a very poorly attenuating yeast. What I don’t like so much about it is how the hops play together with this residual sweetness: even though I only used Saaz hops as the sole hop addition for bittering, the beer got a very spicy hop flavour. That would be great in a dryer beer, but with 4°P final gravity, it’s just a tad too sweet, and that just clashes a bit. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a good beer, and I’ll happily drink it, but the next one I’d do differently. Definitely a better attenuating lager yeast, and maybe a different hop variety. I think I really need to research Austrian 19th century hops wrt. to what Anton Dreher used in his beers. As mentioned in one of my previous articles, it’s very unfortunate that Austrian hop land races were (presumably) lost either due to illnesses (which ultimately brought us Styrian Goldings) or a forced stop of any hop-growing activities by the Nazis (as it happened in Mühlviertel, Upper Austria).

Another lesson that I learned was that the WLP820 yeast strain, at least in its first fermentation, is extremely slow. I even employed a quick lagering schedule with which I had had success in previous beers, but it still took 3 weeks until fermentation completely stopped. At least it behaved pretty much as expected, and was only a tiny bit more attenuative than its historic predecessor. Starting at 13°P original gravity, it fermented down to 4°P, while brewing records show something closer to 4.5°P to have been the beer’s final gravity. That’s fine with me, really.

All in all, it was definitely an interesting exercise, with a tasty outcome, and I really learned what works and (more importantly!) what doesn’t with Vienna lagers.

Brewing

Brewing a Vienna Lager

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About a month ago, I posted about some things I found out about Vienna lagers, and how the historic original probably was like compared to modern versions of that style.

So yesterday, we finally got around to brewing it on my own. I compromised a bit in the whole process, though, just to make a few things a bit easier for me. In particular, I decided not to do a decoction mash.

I use a Weck preserving cooker as a mash tun, as it can contain plenty of liquid for the mash, and it’s electrically heatable, allowing to go through specific rest temperatures without having to resort to having to add hot water later. Just don’t trust the internal thermostat, and use a proper food thermometer instead.

I used 20 liters of water at 66 °C, and mashed in 5.3 kg of Vienna malt. The resulting mash was at 62 °C, and from there on I did a simple Hochkurz infusion mash:

  • 30 minutes at 62 °C
  • 20 minutes at 72 °C
  • 10 minutes at 78 °C

For modern malts and a high degree of diastatic base malts (like 100% in this case), that’s good enough to fully convert all starches.

After an iodine test showed that all starches were indeed converted, we continued with lautering. For that, we use a simple bucket from my preferred homebrewing online store, with a Mattmill false bottom.

For sparging, we always employ a colander with a food container lid set in the middle, to sprinkle hot water on the mash. BTW, my hot water is… my boiler. My flat contains a large boiler that actually delivers 80 °C hot water. Perfect for sparging.

 

The collected wort showed a pre-boil gravity of about 12 Brix, which later turned out to be probably not quite exact. I think I need to recalibrate it with distilled water. *sigh*

Anyway, we boiled it for 90 minutes, with 60 grams of Saaz hops for bittering, and no other hop addition.

After a whirlpool, I moved the wort to a fermentation bucket, and cooled it down to 20 °C with an immersion chiller, then moved it to my keezer to further cool it to 11 °C.

The hydrometer showed a bit more than 13 °P as original gravity, while the refractometer showed 14 Brix. A recalibration really seems necessary.

Finally, in the evening, I pitched a starter of WLP820 yeast. That should give a low attenuation comparable to the lager yeast that was used in the 19th century in Anton Dreher’s brewery. The beer is going to ferment in the next two weeks or so. I’ll use Brülosopher’s quick lagering method, as I’ve had some good experience with it in previous batches of lager brewing.

As soon as the beer is finished lagering and carbonating, I’ll post a report about the final result.

Recipes

My First IPA

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About two years ago, a friend of mine got married. I was a relatively inexperienced homebrewer then, but my previous few beers turned out quite alright, so though I’d be bold and try to… *gasp* design my own IPA recipe as a wedding present!

I looked at existing recipes, how they were put together, and then I checked what was available from the homebrewing online store of my choice, and chose a few things that sounded good to me. I emphasize “sounded” because I had really only read about different hop and malt varieties, and recommended yeast strains for IPAs, but that was it.

Grist:

  • 85 % Pale Ale Malt
  • 10 % Vienna Malt
  • 5 % CaraHell

Hops:

  • 1.5 g/l Summit (15% AA) @ 60 min
  • 1.5 g/l Cascade (5.8% AA) @ 10 min
  • 1.5g/l East Kent Goldings (4.8% AA) @ 14 days dry-hopping
  • 1.5g/l Cascade (5.8% AA) @ 14 days dry-hopping
  • 1g/l Summit (15% AA) @ 14 days dry-hopping

90 minute mash at 68 °C, then 60 minutes of boiling. US-05 yeast. OG was 16.5 °P, FG was 4°P.

Fortunately, the result was a big success. I haven’t brewed it since then, but I’m still astonished how well this beer turned out to be. A bit of a lucky shot, but whatever. Just don’t ask me why I put it together like that. If I designed an American IPA recipe nowadays, I wouldn’t do things too differently, though.

Beer Styles

Reflections on Beer Taxonomy

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People are obsessed with taxonomy. Classifying things. Grouping things by how similar they are in certain properties, and to distinguish them. Everything. Flora and fauna, chemical compounds, diseases, fonts, whatever you can imagine. And of course beer.

So obviously, there are different kinds of beers, often distinguished by colour, alcohol strength, aroma, flavour, ingredients, and often connected to a certain locality.

So different people got together, and put much thought into classifying beer, and put these characteristics into beer style guidelines. The Beer Judge Certification Program Style Guideline is a very common one among homebrewers. Then there’s the Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines, developed and annually updated as guideline for professional beer judging. CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, also has their own style guidelines, which are mostly focused on British beer, i.e. milds, bitters, golden ales, porters, stouts, and similar styles.

But when you look at these style guidelines, they contradict each other in lots of details. I criticized this earlier in my article about Vienna lager. Such contradiction is only natural and to be expected, because, well, humans are humans, and humans have opinions, sometimes very strong ones. The understanding of lots of beer styles is a rather informal one, so beers are grouped by similarity, and then from this similarity, a more general description is derived. And edge cases are often the problem here.

Some people go crazy about styles. Especially among homebrewers I’ve noticed that the BJCP guidelines are seen as the universal truth and gospel, even though claims about a lot of beer styles are completely unfounded and ahistorical. In the extreme cases this leads to people beers brewed after historic recipes as “not true to style“, because of minuscule details they or someone else might have just made up or misinterpreted.

Or another case that I stumbled upon, is this hilarious question on reddit recently about Hall&Woodhouse’s Poacher’s Choice. The important question is whether this beer is a strong ale or a winter warmer.  There wasn’t much response to this, but people argued it may be a strong ale, a strong pale ale, or a winter warmer, but probably not a winter warmer, because they usually are spiced. WAT? What is the difference between a strong ale and a strong pale ale in the first place, and what is a winter warmer? A case of people assuming something about a beer style, even though there is not the slightest bit of consensus in sight. Last time I checked, none of the style guidelines are really clear on that. Plus I don’t think there’s any useful definition of a winter warmer out there in the first place.

But that’s a general problem, especially with English beer styles: some beers are just too similar. Fuller’s, and that’s always my favourite example, makes three different beers from the same grist, but doing three runnings, and then blending them to get three different worts of different strength.

For whatever reason, may it be disillusionment, or just an attempt of distinguishing yourself from others, more and more brewers and beer producing companies went a post-modern way of describing beer styles, where all styles basically got deconstructed, and aspects of beer styles got reduced to simple terms and attributes, and everyone can just pick them up, put them together as they like.

Golden, Blonde, Pale, Amber, Dark, Black, Red, Brown, White, Belgian, English, Norwegian, American, India, Imperial, Double, Triple, Session, Strong, Farmhouse, Abbey, Wheat, Rye, Spelt, Old, Aged, Infused, Ale, Helles, Stout, Porter, Lager, Pilsner, Lambic, Hefeweizen, Gose, Saison.

This, of course, gets absurd really quickly, where breweries release beers that they “Imperial Porters”, using the “Imperial” to imply a stronger beer than a “normal” porter. You know what a stronger porter is called? A stout. Same with “Imperial Lager”. It’s Bockbier, really.

So, how should we deal with that? Shall the craft beer scene of the 2010’s be like the metal and rock scene 10, 15 years ago, where each band had to “invent” their very “own” music style?

I know no ultimate solution, but at least I have one idea for an approach: be more moderate in discussing styles. Less strict interpretations of arbitrary style guidelines, more reflection on existing beer styles and their history (!), all that balanced with less forced distinction. Because in the end, all that counts is that we enjoy good and creative beer, and not fight about absurd styles and names.

And now excuse me, I need to design a recipe for a Golden Imperial Session Stout Lager. 😉

P.S.: on a side note, it took me about two weeks to write this article, because WordPress seriously screwed me over and decided to simply not save a previous revision of that article, and so I had rewrite about half of the article. Another reminder why I’m sometimes not fond of IT in general and software in particular.

Events

Berlin Homebrewing Competition 2015

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For the first time, there will be a homebrewing competition this year, for homebrewers from Berlin and Brandenburg. This competition is organized by Rory Lawton. More information about the competition can be found here.

Rory is currently looking for some judges, so if you’re experienced in beer tasting and haven’t registered yet, please do so here, because you need to register by the end of March. So hurry up!

Talking about the homebrewing competition, I will be submitting beers to three out of four categories, so I’m not eligible as judge for all but one category in the first place. In addition to that, I’ll be in Northern Ireland and Yorkshire for a total of two weeks in May, when the judging takes place.

Also, I will publish recipes for my beers (an English Brown Ale, an American Pale Ale, and a Czech Pilsner) here at some point after the submission deadline, that’s the 18th of April. To be frank, I’m already quite excited about the judging results that (hopefully) will be published at some point in May. Homebrewing competitions in Germany are… rare, to say the least, so getting absolutely honest and unbiased feedback from an anonymized tasting is something to look forward to.

History, Recipes

Tracing the origins of Vienna Lager

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As an Austrian, I’m naturally interested in Austrian beer. One of the heritages of Austrian brewing is the Vienna lager beer style, a style that has actually long been forgotten in its country of origin, where the contemporary beer market has been dominated by beers that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike German and Czech beers. Austrian Märzen is less alcoholic and a bit paler than Bavarian one, Austrian Helles is hoppier than the Bavarian counterpart, and Austrian Pilsner doesn’t have the same flavour profile like German or Czech Pilsners. The only German beer that to me that has a flavour profile similar to Austrian beers is Rothaus Pilsner.

Only recently, Vienna lager has been rediscovered in Austria: Brauhaus Gusswerk produces a very nice one, and with Ottakringer’s “Wiener Original”, there is even a mainstream supermarket beer of that old style (for the record, it’s one of my favourite local beers whenever I’m back in Austria).

Outside of Austria, and that’s what most literature will tell you, Vienna lager survived by getting picked up as a beer style by Austrian immigrant brewers in Mexico, and from there it was subsequently picked up by the thriving US-American craft beer scene. That’s a reason why the beer style’s definition is very much dominated by an American view on it, like the BJCP definition and the Brewers Assocation Beer Style Guidelines. And that’s where the problems begin.

Both style definitions contradict each other, with BJCP describing it with “Caramel aroma is inappropriate” and “No roasted or caramel flavor”, while the BA says “malty aroma, which should have a notable degree of toasted and/or slightly roasted malt character”.

I’m not entirely happy with either definition, just like I’m generally not very happy with what the BJCP writes about some other beer styles. So I wanted to find out what Vienna lager was actually like, originally, and whether an authentic recipe can be reconstructed.

To start of, I first needed to find out what the beer looked and tasted like. Emil Leyser, in his book “Die Malz- und Bierbereitung” from 1900, wrote (I only have excerpts, sorry) that Vienna beers have a golden yellow colour, a very rounded and full-bodied flavour with a low hop bitterness. He also explicitly states that the beer does not have anything caramelly or “assamar” (roasted bitterness).

In his book “Decoction!” (p.29), Ron Pattinson lists some beer analysis results from Viennese beers from 1870. One entry in that table is particularly interesting:

  • Beer: Lager
  • Brewery: Schwechat
  • Where sample obtained: direct from the brewery
  • OG beer: 1017.60
  • Balling wort: 13.25°
  • Balling beer: 4.51°
  • Apparent degree of attenuation: 65.94
  • ABV: 4.6
  • Lactic acid: 0.13
  • Colour: 6.3

It’s not entirely clear what unit of measure colour is. I assume SRM, for one particular reason: beers of that colour are usually described as golden, which would match Emil Leyser’s description.

What’s also quite interesting is how low the attenuation is. I assume “OG beer” refers to the gravity points of the finished beer, “final gravity” in modern terms. Balling is the predecessor of the Plato scale, and 4.51° for the final gravity are relatively close to 1017.6 gravity points. Full-bodied, indeed.

When going further in finding some bits and pieces, I also looked at what Ottakringer is writing about their modern version of Vienna lager: they say they use Vienna malt, Melanoidin malt, and Saaz hops. Their original gravity is lower than the 1870’s analysis (12 °P), and the amount of alcohol is higher, as well (5.3 % ABV), so their beer would be a lot drier than the historic beer. The ingredients are notable, though: Vienna malt as the obvious choice for the malt (it’s the malt that was expressly developed for Vienna lager, after all), Melanoidin malt, presumably to add more colour and to imitate the additional melanoidin production of a proper triple decoction, and Saaz hops as a classic noble hop variety. Saaz is considered a Czech hop variety nowadays, but don’t forget that in the 19th century, Bohemia was part of Cisleithania, the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary. At least from a historic point of view, it is an absolutely reasonable choice in hops.

Saaz was not the only hop growing region in Austria, though. In Mühlviertel, the part of Upper Austria north of the river Danube, there’s been (and still is) an active hop growing industry, as well. It’s hard to tell which varieties were grown in the 19th century, though, as production had ceased during World War 2, and after the war, hop gardens were repopulated with German, Slovenian and British hop varieties. Hops were grown in southern Styria as well, which is now part Austria, part Slovenia, but the hops there were replaced after problems with diseases in the early 20th century, and Styrian Goldings, a Fuggle with local terroir, and other hop varieties  bred from Styrian Goldings are grown there nowadays.

Now that we’ve generally established what malt and what hops would be appropriate, we still need to find the right yeast. Obviously bottom-fermenting, preferably Bavarian. Anton Dreher and Gabriel Sedlmayr had worked together in researching English brewing technology, and so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that Dreher would have gotten a bottom-fermenting yeast strain from Sedlmayr’s Spaten brewery.

Earlier, we already established the desired attenuation of only about 66 %. Wyeast has WY2308 “Munich Lager”, at 70-74 % attenuation, which is already pretty close to what we’re looking for. White Labs has WLP820 “Oktoberfest/Märzen Lager Yeast”, with an attenuation of 65 to 73 %. This looks much better already! They also offer WLP838 “South German Lager Yeast” (68-76 %), WLP860 “Munich Helles Yeast” (68-72 %) and WLP920 “Old Bavarian Lager Yeast” (66-73 %) that are a similar range of attenuation.

According to the Yeast Strain Comparison Chart, WY2308 is the same strain as WLP838, which apparently is the yeast strain “Wisenschaftliche Station #308” from Munich. According to the same chart, WLP820, the closest choice in terms of attenuation, is the “Weihenstephan 206” yeast strain, and the same as WY2206, which is specified to attenuate higher (73-77 %), though. Either the chart is a bit off here, or there has been some genetic drift in the propagation of one these strains. But for me, WLP820 sounds close enough.

So, based on this information, if I were to design a recipe for a Vienna lager, I would do it like that:

  • 100 % Vienna malt, enough to get a OG of 1053 (13 °P).
  • Ideally, a triple decoction mash.
  • A single bittering addition of Saaz hops, e.g. 3 g/l (3.5 % AA) for 90 minutes to gain 27 IBU*.
  • A cold fermentation with WLP820 yeast that should end up with a final gravity of about 1018 (4.5 °P).

(* I’d keep the bitterness at the higher end to counteract the very high final gravity)

Based on what I could find out, this would match the original beer style relatively closely. When you enter that into a recipe calculator, the typical colour you will get is about 6 to 7 SRM (about 12 to 14 EBC). This is much closer to how Vienna lager was described by Emil Leyser. It also is a lot paler than the style definitions of BJCP and Brewers Association, which specify a range of 10 to 16 SRM resp. 12 to 26 SRM.

(On a side note, the resulting recipe above is remarkably simple, in modern homebrewers terms, it’s a SMaSH (single malt and single hops) beer.)

Of course, this is not enough. A direct comparison with historic documents from the Klein-Schwechater Brauerei directly would be interesting, because this recipe is merely put together from bits and pieces, with plenty of (informed) guesswork to fill in missing gaps. If anybody has something like that, please contact me, as I would really like to see whether the historic original would confirm or deny what I put together here.

And of course, I haven’t brewed this beer yet. That’s an exercise for another time.

Recipes

Designing simple beer recipes

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Usually, people that are new to homebrewing start off buying a recipe kit, with ready to use ingredients, whether it’s malt extract or crushed malt, and will continue to do for a few more brewers. Then people get more interested, and start looking into taking existing recipes, tweaking them, and creating something new. And that’s what gets them hooked.

At least that’s what it was for me. The first three brews or so were fine, using existing recipes respectively kits. But then I got bold, and wanted to try out new stuff, and created an actually quite alright American IPA.

And after that first experience, people want to try out new ingredients, different malts, different hops, different yeast strains. And end up with beers with 10 different malts and 5 different hops. And all the flavours are muddy and the beer is full of disappointment.

There are different ways to counter that. The most extreme approach is SMaSH. SMaSH stands for “Single Malt and Single Hops”, and refers to the use of just one malt variety and one hop variety, with any mash and hop schedule that you can come up with. It’s absolutely minimalistic, because of so few ingredients that all have to shine, and it’s a good way to evaluate new ingredients.

There’s actually lots of beer styles that you can (but not necessarily have to) brew as a SMaSH:

  • Pilsner: 100 % Pilsner malt, 100 % Saaz hops with an aggressive hop schedule.
  • Vienna lager: 100 % Vienna malt, 100 % of a noble hop variety or related with a rather restrained hop schedule for bitterness only.
  • Munich Dunkles lager: 100 % dark Munich malt, 100 % noble hops, with very little hopping just for bitterness.
  • Munich Helles lager: 100 % Pilsner malt, restrained hopping for bitterness from 100 % noble hops.
  • Historically, English porter used to be brewed out of 100 % brown malt up to the 18th century (brown malt back then was very different from modern brown malt and had enough diastatic power to convert itself).

And some professional brewers are going for that as well. Vagabund Brauerei here in Berlin have done several SMaSH ales which were clearly interesting, some were pretty good, some not so great.

But at some point, you just reach an end. There are just some things that you can’t brew as a SMaSH. And so Drew Beechum came up with an interesting extension of SMaSH that he aptly named “brewing on the ones”.

(slides here)

Instead of just limiting to one malt and one hop, you’re limited to

  • one base malt
  • one specialty malt or adjunct
  • one brewing sugar
  • one hop variety
  • one spice

Of course you can leave out stuff (not every beer needs to be spiced, thankfully!), but this suddenly gives a lot more freedom: you can brew Hefeweizen (>= 50 % wheat malt, the rest Pilsner malt), Tripels (100 % Pilsner malt, Candi syrup), any strength of English bitter or Pale Ale (Pale malt with some crystal malt; e.g. Fullers even use one mash, collect different runnings, and blend them to produce three different beers, that is Golden Pride, ESB and Chiswick Bitter), etc. etc.

And when you have brewed like this, it gives you a good perspective that good beers don’t necessarily require a complex grain bill or a complex hopping schedule. Some beers are just about simple ingredients and the brewing process done right.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should brew all your beers like that. But it definitely helps to not just put together as many malts or hops, but to think about every single malt what function it’s supposed to fulfill. Like do you really need these barley flakes? Why do you put them in anyway? What about these two types of caramel malt of very similar colour? Chocolate malt and black malt? Do 5 % wheat malt really make a difference? You get the gist.

In my own beers, I usually try to keep things simple, two to three different malts, for more malt-focused beers just a single hop variety for bittering and very little aroma, for hoppy beers one bittering hop and then one to three hop varieties. Three is even a bit on the edge, but fine as long as flavours don’t go muddy. With that rule of thumb I managed to produce some quite alright beers in the past. And of course, rules are sometimes meant to be broken. 😉