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Author Topic: Marzen  (Read 4397 times)

Offline morticaixavier

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Re: Marzen
« Reply #15 on: February 03, 2014, 09:50:33 am »
Alright, this beer is in the fridge.

I pitched ~200-250 ml of pretty thick slurry of 10 day old unknown but apparently widely available White Labs Lager yeast into each 5 gallons after whipping up a nice thick head of foam with my trusty balloon whisk.

My question now is this:

I normally pitch yeast and leave my ales alone for ~2 weeks or more however, if I understand correctly I should be paying a little more attention because I may want to bump the temp when there are still a few gravity points to burn in order to clean up diacetyl. Am I thinking correctly? If so when do I start checking in? My temp control is set to 48 with the probe outside the fermenter.

In case anyone is wondering I went with:

15 lbs munich
9 lbs pils
mash at 148 for 30 minutes then infused up to 157 for another 60. I did no sparge and hit my normal ~70% brewhouse efficiency for a final gravity of 1.057.

bittered with 30 grams magnum at 60 and then 25 grams liberty at 30
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Offline chumley

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Re: Marzen
« Reply #16 on: February 04, 2014, 09:48:35 am »
Bump up the gravity to 1.066, and that looks a lot like my mai-bock recipe.

I generally let lagers go for a month.  I ferment in 6.5 gallon better bottles, and I give them a good swirl every 3 -4 days or so to re-suspend the yeast and get those extra few gravity points lower.

As far as diacetyl goes, I have been brewing lagers for 20 years and have only had it show up once. The need for a diacetyl rest is greatly overstated, about like the need for air locks. I would suggest tasting it when it looks done, and if you taste it, do the rest, if not just keg or bottle it.