Revvy’s Vienna Lager

January 31, 2010

Yesterday I brewed a 5 gallon batch of Revvy’s Vienna Lager. I had to make some substitutions though. My homebrew store only had 3 pounds of Vienna Malt, and I needed 8. One of the employees told me that Munich malt would taste the same, although it may make the beer darker.

I’m not really too concerned with the color, and I was going for a Negra Modella type beer, so dark was OK with me.

I ended up using the 3 pounds of Vienna they had, then 4 lbs of Dark Munich, and 1 LB of light Munich. All this is being fermented by some Munich lager yeast.

This is actually my first lager, and I’m hoping it turns out well. I had purchased a chest freezer on craig’s list, and a temperature controller. All this time I had been brewing in warm weather, and I’ve only recently realized that the challenge may no longer be keeping the wort cool, but rather keeping it warm. My garage has been a cool 40 degrees lately, which would be ok for the lagering stage, but could cause issues with the fermentation stage. (Lagers generally ferment around 50 – 55 degrees.

I left the carboy in my kitchen overnight, and had some nice activity going in the vapor lock when I woke up this morning. Then I moved it into the freezer (which isn’t plugged in) in the garage, and the temp quickly rose from 40 degrees to 50 degrees. I’m hoping that the fermentation activity and the mass of the liquid will keep the temp in the freezer in the 50’s.

This should be the first batch that I keg. I’ve got everything to keg now except for some tubing, and the Cornelius kegs.

I’m very much looking forward to kegging the beer, bottling is just a pain in the neck sometimes.