Arwen and I had our first brew day in a long while today – certainly the first brew of the year!
Our previous two brews were both Saisons, one a with Rye as an adjunct, and the second brewed on the yeast cake of the first, with wheat malt. Now, I’ve finished the wheat saison, which was definitely my favourite of the two, but still have a few pints of the Rye Saison left.
In retrospect – it was a mistake brewing two such… distinctive beers back-to-back. Even one keg full of either brew would have been a lot. It’s not that they were bad, it’s just it’s one of those beers where, after a pint of it, you’re like – “I fancy something different now”, and potentially also “I don’t need another pint of that for some time!”.
So, as somewhat of an antidote to that, we brewed a pseudo lager today!
We went with a simple grain bill and hop schedule, and using a kveik yeast rather than a lager yeast. It’s been so hot these last few weeks, we worried we couldn’t keep the fermentation temperature low enough for lager fermentation.
With the Voss Kveik yeast we used, we can keep the temperature of the fermenter in the 20 to 22 degrees range to get a relatively clean ferment, without the fruity esters you get when fermenting with a kveik in the high 30s.
Overall we went with 3.9kg of Pilsner malt, with 250g of Vienna malt for a bit of flavour and colour. Hops wise, we went with 35g of Hallertau Mittlefruh at the start of the boil, and 30g when we had just 15 minutes left, which should give us an IBU of 26, and a fairly balanced hops/grain balance. We used whirlfloc to clear the wort, and ended up with 18 litres of wort at 1.042 gravity, which is a little below what we were aiming for in terms of both volume and gravity.
Still, I’m hoping we’ll end up with maybe 15 litres of 4.4% lager when we’re done. Oh, and the name? Well, Istik, when you a using a yeast strain called Voss for your brew, Kith’rak seemed like the sensible choice!
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