Brew Session

Batch #21 – Mexican Lager

Batch# 21 – Mexican Lager

Date Brew:06/10/2014 Rack*:7/15/2014 Bottle:8/12/2014

Recipe:

Ken Lenard has been doing some interesting work on brewing up Mexican-style lagers (pacifico, imperial, corona, etc) over on his Blog. Here’s the page we got his recipe from.

Goals:

Make something light and very drinkable for summer. We will probably add fruit to at least half of this, if not all of it. Current considerations are watermelon,  strawberry, cherry, peach, raspberry, or citrus. This was our second BIAB batch, so we’re getting more all-grain practice.

Brew Notes:

The mash went well. We surfed the gas and kept it around 150 the whole time, although we ended a little bit high. The boil was smooth in chris’ big pot, no boilovers. We added irish moss to help clear it a bit. The pre boil sample was 1.042, post boil after rediluting to 5 gal was 1.048. The copper wort chiller was used and worked well.

OG FG ABV
Recipe 1.043 1.009 4.5%
Recorded- base beer 1.048 1.012 4%
Recorded – with watermelon 1.048 1.010 5%

Yeast:

1L starter started from wyeast (2124 bohemian lager) 100b liquid pack on brew day-3. Spun on stir plate in basement. I stepped it up by 1600ml more on brew day-2, put in ironman cooler on brew day -1. The yeast didn’t floc out much at all, so I had a mini corny keg full with 3l of starter. In the end I added the bottom of the corny, and a bit more that settled out in the erlenmeyer flask.

Fruit Additions:

Our plan was to add watermelon to half and cherry concentrate to half. The cherry concentrate we got was _Terrible_ and thankfully we tried to find a good mix in a pint glass before dumping it in. It tasted very raisiny, and no amount was the right amount. The watermelon was from a fresh organic watermelon that I scooped out, froze, and then thawed. We probably added around 3-4 cups of juice to one of the 3 gal kegs.

watermelon

Fermentation notes:

These fermented in chris’ basement, then Chris’s roof flooded, then we moved them to Ross’s house.

Bottling notes:

We bottled the non-fruited half after two months. The watermelon half remains kegged.

Label

Tasting notes:

Conclusion:

Once again this beer came out much darker than expected. Especially since this was a biab batch.  I’m looking forward to having better control over color in the future.