[hopfenundmalz]

With a rise to 8C, that is definitely a Saaz lager strain.

I had to look, the picture was taken on Sept 4. It could be done, or it could rise more.

If I ever get back I will ask more questions. 

[Saccharomyces]

One thing I would like to add that most brewers are not thinking about is delta-T between the starter and the wort into which the culture is being pitched.  Ideally, a culture should be close in temperature to the wort into which it is being pitched in order to avoid temperature shock.  Pitching a cooler starter into warmer wort is preferred to pitching a warmer starter into cooler wort.  Most starters are in the 20 to 22C range when pitched.

[Bel Air Brewing]

One of the best beers that I've ever poured down my neck was the PH from the classic cellar in Pilsen. The unfiltered unpasteurized one, straight from the 4000 Liter Lagering barrels.

That beer is pitched at 5C, then rises, how high I'm not sure. They had daily temperature reading marked in chalk on the wooden fermenters. Not sure of the final temp.

New phone, still figuring how to get old images to where tapatalk will find them.

Been there, done that! Best beer ever! The beer you see here is the actual beer served to visitors, made the original way.

[lupulus]

Narziss, Kunze, Back all recommend pitching below fermentation temperature.
Can you list the pro references you have seen?

Most of the professional publications I have read do not call for pitching below fermentation temperature. I have never read a German brewing publication because a) I do not speak German and b) the books that have been translated to English are ridiculously priced.  Chris White is the big reference for pitching above fermentation temperature and allowing the temperature to drop.  I trust Chris because there is no doubt that he has put time in the woodshed with respect to this one and I understand yeast well enough to know that what he is doing is backed up by science.  Chris was the first person I heard talk about fermenting lagers under pressure at what are considered to be ale temperatures.  Most brewers would think that was blasphemy.  He and his team are routinely pushing the outside of the envelope.  One of the largest costs encountered in brewing is refrigeration.  That is why there is so much interest in the Kveik cultures.

Th reality is that lager brewing practices are sub-optimal for ale brewing.  Carlsberg Unterhefe No. 1 (the Saaz family type yeast strain) combined with mechanical refrigeration made brewing on scale that was previously impossible.  Why?  Because Saaz strains are highly cryotolerant and wild yeast and bacteria are not, which means a brewer can get away with practices that will not fly in an ale brewery because fermentation temperatures cannot be dropped low enough to avoid wild yeast and bacteria replication.  With ale brewing, one has to rely on the yeast culture consuming all of the dissolved O₂, lowering the pH, and producing ethanol in order to out compete competitors.  With lager brewing, one can hold the temperature low enough that competitors are shut out from the start.  In essence, lager brewing is a completely different type of brewing where many of the rules do not apply to ale brewing and vice versa.

A few disconnected comments.

Don't know of a pro publication with lager expertise that recommends this.
The yeast reference for lager brewers is G Annemüller.

Augustiner has been fermenting under pressure well before it was brought up in the US pro or homebrew forums.

My guess is that the combination of vitality and yeast volume that's required for correct lager brewing would make it too costly for a yeast company to sell the right volume pitch at a reasonable price, but I don't know.

Annemüller, Narziss and others have the volumes you are to pitch for a proper lager fermentation.

Prost!

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[Northern_Brewer]

I have not found a single reference to pitching below fermentation temperature outside of the amateur brewing forums.  Most professional references I have seen state to pitch at fermentation temperature or a few degrees higher.

In British brewing it's historically always been the norm to pitch fairly cool and then let it free-rise - and since cooling became available, then to come down again a bit towards the end of fermentation to stop the bugs cleaning up too much.

But if you look at the British commercial recipes on Ron Pattinson's site, you'll see that almost all of them are pitching in the 59-63F range (including the Scottish ones, they're not pitching at near-lager temperatures as some conventional wisdom would make out).

Great Britain has moved away from it for the most part.  While I may be wrong, I believe that we are the only industrialized country in the world that has held on to the Fahrenheit scale.

Come on, you've something in common with Liberia there!

Whereas here in the UK (not just Great Britain), we drive at 50mph to a pub where we'll have a 50g pack of peanuts and a (20oz) pint of lager dispensed from a 50-litre keg and a pint of ale from a 9-gallon cask.

It's a mess - although to be fair miles and drink-pints are the only real exceptions to metric, and are protected in law. And temperatures near freezing are always in centigrade whilsts hot temperatures are expressed in a mix of centrigrade and Farenheit, particularly in newspaper headlines.

To be honest, the one that really confused me was the gallons/pints thing. I knew in theory that the US had its own gallons, but it took me a while to click that all these "5 gallon" homebrew recipes were actually using 19 litres rather than 23 litres.

And grams/litre for hops and grist is just so, so much easier to scale...

[Bel Air Brewing]

With regards to scales involving temperature, there is a reason we have kept the Fahrenheit scale. It is far finer, i.e., more accurate than Centigrade / Celsius.
All of us (in the USA) grew up with F. It is my standard temp of reference. All pitching temps with regards to W-34/70, and fermentation are referenced in F.
We are all free to use the scale we prefer...at least for the time being.

[tommymorris]

With regards to scales involving temperature, there is a reason we have kept the Fahrenheit scale. It is far finer, i.e., more accurate than Centigrade / Celsius.
All of us (in the USA) grew up with F. It is my standard temp of reference. All pitching temps with regards to W-34/70, and fermentation are referenced in F.
We are all free to use the scale we prefer...at least for the time being.

Re: precision. There is nothing stopping a person from using one or more digits to the right of the decimal point when measuring temperature in Celsius.

[hopfenundmalz]

With regards to scales involving temperature, there is a reason we have kept the Fahrenheit scale. It is far finer, i.e., more accurate than Centigrade / Celsius.
All of us (in the USA) grew up with F. It is my standard temp of reference. All pitching temps with regards to W-34/70, and fermentation are referenced in F.
We are all free to use the scale we prefer...at least for the time being.

Re: precision. There is nothing stopping a person from using one or more digits to the right of the decimal point when measuring temperature in Celsius.

Correct. If I switch a digital thermometer from C to F, does it become more accurate? No.

[Bel Air Brewing]

With regards to scales involving temperature, there is a reason we have kept the Fahrenheit scale. It is far finer, i.e., more accurate than Centigrade / Celsius.
All of us (in the USA) grew up with F. It is my standard temp of reference. All pitching temps with regards to W-34/70, and fermentation are referenced in F.
We are all free to use the scale we prefer...at least for the time being.

Re: precision. There is nothing stopping a person from using one or more digits to the right of the decimal point when measuring temperature in Celsius.

You have helped my argument. Why use decimal points, when whole numbers are readily available?
Again...it's my personal hangup. For those who prefer C to F, with the required fractions, knock yourself out.

[Bel Air Brewing]

With regards to scales involving temperature, there is a reason we have kept the Fahrenheit scale. It is far finer, i.e., more accurate than Centigrade / Celsius.
All of us (in the USA) grew up with F. It is my standard temp of reference. All pitching temps with regards to W-34/70, and fermentation are referenced in F.
We are all free to use the scale we prefer...at least for the time being.

Re: precision. There is nothing stopping a person from using one or more digits to the right of the decimal point when measuring temperature in Celsius.

Correct. If I switch a digital thermometer from C to F, does it become more accurate? No.

My point is Fahrenheit is a finer scale, and most often does not require the use of fractions to accurately depict the correct temperature, unlike C.

This will help illustrate...I flew B-777's for a major US airline. Internationally, around the world. All of our performance data such as take off performance, climb performance, etc., was based on using Fahrenheit as it is a finer scale avoiding the need for fractions.

[Saccharomyces]

All of us (in the USA) grew up with F. It is my standard temp of reference. All pitching temps with regards to W-34/70, and fermentation are referenced in F.

I do not know where you grew up, but I was taught the metric system in junior high school (what is referred to as middle school these days) in the seventies in preparation for the U.S. to move to it. However, the movement fizzled out (does anyone remember speed limit signs and speedometers in metric and U.S. customary units of measure).  The reality is that the U.S. has not been a pure U.S. customary units of measure country for the better part of five decades.  Legal alcohol has not been sold in U.S. customary units since 10/1/1976.  For example, the fifth was replaced with a volume of 750ml.  The quart was replaced with the liter. What is referred to as a pint today is actually 375ml (12.68 fl. ozs).  A half pint is 200ml (6.76 fl. ozs).   Non-alcoholic beverages are mixed U.S. customary units and the metric system.  Bottle sizes less than a liter are sold in ounces.  Bottle a liter and above are sold in liters.  Automobiles use a combination of U.S. customary units and metric. 

A lot of Americans refer to our system as imperial units of measure.  However, that is only partially correct.   A U.S. inch is equal to an imperial inch.  However, a U.S. fluid ounce is not equal to an imperial ounce.  A U.S. fluid ounce is 1.04084 imperial ounces.  What we refer to as a barrel of beer today actually started out as a wine unit of measure; namely, the Queen Anne barrel.  Our gallon size is actually the Queen Anne gallon, which is why it is different than the imperial gallon.  A Queen Anne barrel is 1/8th of a tun, which is 252 Queen Anne gallons. 

The reality is that U.S. customary units are an incoherent hodgepodge. The only reason Americans understand U.S. customary units is because they are raised with the system and most only know a fraction of it.  Weight and volume are disconnected, which is why most lab work is performed using the metric system.  The U.S. had the opportunity to be the second country to adopt the metric system and Thomas Jefferson passed because it was a French creation that he found to be too decimal (base 10), which is weird because he created the first base 10 currency in the world.  If want to talk about accuracy, the metric system blows U.S. customary units of measure out of the water precisely because it is base 10.  For example, what base is U.S. liquid volume?  A quick look at the units of measure for a sub-fluid ounce will demonstrate how much of a mess our system is with respect to metric system.  A dram is 1/8th of a fluid ounce. Really?  That makes absolutely no sense once one realizes that most Americans are only taught base 10 arithmetic. Few people outside of computer scientists, computer engineers, mathematicians, and other select engineering types can work in any numerical base other than 10.

[Saccharomyces]

In British brewing it's historically always been the norm to pitch fairly cool and then let it free-rise - and since cooling became available, then to come down again a bit towards the end of fermentation to stop the bugs cleaning up too much.

But if you look at the British commercial recipes on Ron Pattinson's site, you'll see that almost all of them are pitching in the 59-63F range (including the Scottish ones, they're not pitching at near-lager temperatures as some conventional wisdom would make out).

Bingo!  Most of the ale strains that Americans use originally came from the UK where they were selected under pressure over hundreds of years sans refrigeration.  If the mixed cultures from which modern ale strains of British were isolated did not perform well at between 18 and 22C, they would have been discarded.  Lager brewing is a completely different kind of brewing with its own set of rules.  Lager cultures were not originally cropped from the top.  The practice of top-cropping is what allowed ale brewers to separate domesticated yeast from wild yeast and bacteria because wild yeast and bacteria do not floc to the top.

Great Britain has moved away from it for the most part.  While I may be wrong, I believe that we are the only industrialized country in the world that has held on to the Fahrenheit scale.

Come on, you've something in common with Liberia there!

Lol! There are few Caribbean islands that also use it.
 

Whereas here in the UK (not just Great Britain), we drive at 50mph to a pub where we'll have a 50g pack of peanuts and a (20oz) pint of lager dispensed from a 50-litre keg and a pint of ale from a 9-gallon cask.

It's a mess - although to be fair miles and drink-pints are the only real exceptions to metric, and are protected in law. And temperatures near freezing are always in centigrade whilsts hot temperatures are expressed in a mix of centrigrade and Farenheit, particularly in newspaper headlines.

To be honest, the one that really confused me was the gallons/pints thing. I knew in theory that the US had its own gallons, but it took me a while to click that all these "5 gallon" homebrew recipes were actually using 19 litres rather than 23 litres.

And grams/litre for hops and grist is just so, so much easier to scale...

However, at least the UK is making an effort to bring your units of measure in line with the rest of the world.  That is a big deal for older members of British society who were brought up on the imperial system.  Americans are too obstinate to adopt the metric system wholeheartedly.  However, then again America as a very high percentage of marginally educated people compared to the rest of the industrialized world.  Over thirty million adult Americans cannot read.  We all know that being able to read is important to learning.  The number one gift a teacher can give to a child is to teach him/her how to read.

[Saccharomyces]

Don't know of a pro publication with lager expertise that recommends this.
The yeast reference for lager brewers is G Annemüller.

The keyword here is "lager."  Lager and ale fermentation practices are very different.

My guess is that the combination of vitality and yeast volume that's required for correct lager brewing would make it too costly for a yeast company to sell the right volume pitch at a reasonable price, but I don't know.

Annemüller, Narziss and others have the volumes you are to pitch for a proper lager fermentation.

Now, you should ask yourself why these large pitch rates are required.  Is it because the starting temperature is so low that it retards replication to the point where new cell growth is seriously hampered?  Pitching a large volume of yeast also limits the number of times a culture can be repitched because of the lack of new cell growth during fermentation.

By the way, there is a lot of modern research that renders much of German brewing to the classification of dogma rather than science.  Only Saaz lager strains are adapted well to very cold fermentation because they are allotriploids composed two sets Saccharomyces eubayanus (S. eubayanus) chromosomes and one set of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae).  Frohberg strains are not as cryotolerant because they are allotetraploids composed of two sets of S. eubayanus chromosomes and two sets of S. cerevisiae chromosomes with much of the cryotolerance inherited from S. eubayanus deleted.  W-34/70 is the Frohberg type strain (it is orignally from the Frohberg brewery in Grima, Saxony).  That is why W-34/70 performs astonishingly well at what are considered to be low ale fermentation temperatures.  Below is a link to a publication by the former head of yeast genetics at Carlsberg Laboratories (the place when the first Saaz strain, Carlsberg Unterhefe No. 1, was isolated in 1883 by Emil Hansen). Carlsberg Laboratories is also where the field of yeast genetics was founded by Ojvind Winge and Catherine Roberts.  I exchanged e-mail with Jürgen Wendland a few years ago when I was researching the origins of an old Danish ale yeast culture deposited in a culture collection by Catherine Roberts.  He appears to be cool guy.
 
https://ec.asm.org/content/13/10/1256

[Bel Air Brewing]

All of us (in the USA) grew up with F. It is my standard temp of reference. All pitching temps with regards to W-34/70, and fermentation are referenced in F.

I do not know where you grew up, but I was taught the metric system in junior high school (what is referred to as middle school these days) in the seventies in preparation for the U.S. to move to it. However, the movement fizzled out (does anyone remember speed limit signs and speedometers in metric and U.S. customary units of measure).  The reality is that the U.S. has not been a pure U.S. customary units of measure country for the better part of five decades.  Legal alcohol has not been sold in U.S. customary units since 10/1/1976.  For example, the fifth was replaced with a volume of 750ml.  The quart was replaced with the liter. What is referred to as a pint today is actually 375ml (12.68 fl. ozs).  A half pint is 200ml (6.76 fl. ozs).   Non-alcoholic beverages are mixed U.S. customary units and the metric system.  Bottle sizes less than a liter are sold in ounces.  Bottle a liter and above are sold in liters.  Automobiles use a combination of U.S. customary units and metric. 

A lot of Americans refer to our system as imperial units of measure.  However, that is only partially correct.   A U.S. inch is equal to an imperial inch.  However, a U.S. fluid ounce is not equal to an imperial ounce.  A U.S. fluid ounce is 1.04084 imperial ounces.  What we refer to as a barrel of beer today actually started out as a wine unit of measure; namely, the Queen Anne barrel.  Our gallon size is actually the Queen Anne gallon, which is why it is different than the imperial gallon.  A Queen Anne barrel is 1/8th of a tun, which is 252 Queen Anne gallons. 

The reality is that U.S. customary units are an incoherent hodgepodge. The only reason Americans understand U.S. customary units is because they are raised with the system and most only know a fraction of it.  Weight and volume are disconnected, which is why most lab work is performed using the metric system.  The U.S. had the opportunity to be the second country to adopt the metric system and Thomas Jefferson passed because it was a French creation that he found to be too decimal (base 10), which is weird because he created the first base 10 currency in the world.  If want to talk about accuracy, the metric system blows U.S. customary units of measure out of the water precisely because it is base 10.  For example, what base is U.S. liquid volume?  A quick look at the units of measure for a sub-fluid ounce will demonstrate how much of a mess our system is with respect to metric system.  A dram is 1/8th of a fluid ounce. Really?  That makes absolutely no sense once one realizes that most Americans are only taught base 10 arithmetic. Few people outside of computer scientists, computer engineers, mathematicians, and other select engineering types can work in any numerical base other than 10.

To answer your question, the great state of Iowa. North Central Iowa. Fort Dodge, which was an actual US Cavalry Fort.
We were not taught the metric system. But I did take three years of Spanish.
Again, I fully admit it's my personal problem. My brain is wired in "F".

[majorvices]

Just to back track a little about professional literature and suggested pitching temp here is an excerpt from the MBAA Practical handbook For The Specialty Brewer Vol. 2

"(ale) pitching temperature is typically 59°-62°F (15°-17°C), climbing to 67°-70°F (20°-22°C)..."

... and for lager

"Wort is cooled to 45°F (7°C), aerated to a DO content of 8 ppm, and pitched... as the beer ferments, the temperature rises"