First Lager Fermentation Baby Pictures

Lager yeast fermentation has begun, and boy, does it look weird!

Looking like the inside of a lava lamp, my first batch of lager is bubbling the airlock every 45 seconds after 30 hours at about 54º F in the "cellar" crawlspace.

The photos are a bit grainy as shot with my ancient iPhone's camera and side-lit by an LED flashlight, but you can see the strange and beautiful formations beginning to lace through the top of the primary fermenter. Carbonation is starting to happen, but I can't tell if these blobs are the yeast, large cold break proteins, or some kind of bacteria. The temperature is slightly on the high end of the desired range at 54º F, with 50º F the preferred primary fermentation target, but I hope things will work out.

With a temperature control unit on order from More Beer, I have cleared out our chest freezer in the garage for the secondary/cold lagering phase in ten days to two weeks time.

Pre-Pohibition Lager Brew Day - It's So Easy!

End of the boil for my first lager.

After brewing three relatively massive beers recently, the mash-extract Organic Pre-Prohibition Lager kit from 7 Bridges felt so easy! The mini-mash of grains required a much smaller kettle, the boil was only 40 minutes instead of 60 minutes, and the snowy weather outside was perfect for chilling out the yeast starter and cooling down the boil kettle.

For krausening, I pulled a quart and a half of gyle just before adding the aroma hops. With temperatures hovering between 36º F and 40º F outside, I'll just keep the sanitized and partially filled growler in my garage till fermentation is complete.

My "cellar", the crawlspace beneath our house, seems to be at a stable 52º F this time of year, so I've placed the primary fermenter in there. I hope I wasn't too sloppy with pouring off the mini-wort from my starter yeast.  Palmer suggests watching the lager's primary fermentation every day, and moving to a warmer spot (58º F) for two days before beginning the cold lagering processes in the chest freezer. 

If the fermentation goes as planned, this batch will be ready to drink at the same time as my Mother's Day Organic Farmhouse Ale, first week of May.

Northern Lights IBA Goes to Secondary

Auto-siphoning to a 5 gallon carboy.

A significant layer of trub lay at the bottom of my primary fermenter once the black brew was transferred. The layer was well over an inch thick, so I'm sure a little bit got into the secondary. 

I then began to dry-hop with 1/2 oz. of New Zealand Cascade organic whole hops and 1 oz. of American Summit organic whole hops. My evolving technique is now to boil two dry-hop bags packed with 1 1/2 inch of small round river stones used to try and keep the hops submerged. I then hang the two bags by nylon fishline through the airlock. Knowing these will swell up larger than the carboy opening, I'll plan on siphoning out the beer with the two hop bags left hanging for later extraction.

Palmer's book, "How To Brew", has a tip (way into the lager section) that if you're going to rack to a secondary fermenter, you should do so right after the Kraeusen foam has fallen and vigorous activity in the brew has just started to settle down. I have been waiting till all the visible yeast has really settled. This leads me to suspect I may have found a possible source for the faintly detectible bandaid flavors in my batch #2 Equinox double IPA. In three weeks I will know if the same off-flavors are present in this batch.

Making a Yeast Starter

With a Pre-Prohibition Lager mash-extract ingredient kit on its way via UPS, I decided to get a batch of starter wort ready for the yeast's arrival. And since it is supposed to handle heat well, also to find out how well the 1000ml Erlenmeyer flask holds up to a direct natural gas flame.

So, following Palmer's instructions, 1 pint water, 1/2 cup DME, a couple of hops, all at a boil for 10 minutes, then cooled to 40º F to await the yeast.

The boil went just fine, and saved having to sanitize and transfer to a second container. Nice!

The UPS tracking website says even though the package arrived in town at 9:00 am, there will be no Lager yeast today: "Adverse weather conditions. Weather conditions might delay delivery of this shipment. This is the most current information available. Please track again later for status updates."

Rating My Batch #2 Equinox Double IPA

One month after brewing, here is my RateBeer style evaluation of my second brew. 

The dry hopping didn't provide quite the intense hop aroma I had hoped for, but the flavor hops mostly made up for the aroma shortcomings. I also let the ingredient kit sit around for THREE MONTHS! before I bought equipment and learned to actually brew it. Despite the expected hit to freshness, the beer came out pretty good. 

I look forward to trying this recipe, or a variant, again . . . maybe as a whole grain brew. For now, I have two cases of a very drinkable strong IPA to savor.

Beer: Equinox Organic Legacy Double IPA Mash-Extract kit from Seven Bridges Cooperative.

Aroma: 4 out of 10
Appearance: 4 out of 5
Taste: 6 out of 10
Palate: 4 out of 5
Overall: 14 out of 20
Total Score: 3.2

Clean, but mild, grapefruit and floral hop aroma with mild caramel notes, and a slight hint of band-aid. Clear, deep copper-red body has a thick and foamy light-beige head and insane lacing that lasts to the end of the glass. Well balanced taste of pine wood, strong citrus hops, pronounced bitterness, and a medium malt character. Alcohol is well hidden, but quite apparent after a full pint. Nice and chewy mouthfeel is followed by a medium-dry finish, and the best part of this beer, a long lasting pucker. 

Improvising on Brew Day

The ingredients for my organic India Black Ale arrived by UPS just moments before I got home Thursday afternoon. I immediately whipped up a yeast starter for the White Labs London Ale yeast. Maybe put a couple too many hop pellets into the mini-wort, but activity started before morning.


An inventory of my grain bill for the recipe got me to thinking about the black and Carafa® 2   malts. The are really quite black, and probably a bit smoky/bitter in a full mash. Then I remembered I had seen mention of cold steeping the black adjunct grains as a way to extract the black color without much burnt flavor characteristic coming through. Friday night I combed the homebrew forums and club websites, until I came across a description for cold steeping black adjunct malts by George Fix of Eugene Oregon's Cascade Brewing Society, posted sometime after 2007.


Cold Steeping Black Adjunct Malts


Here are the steps as I adapted for my recipe:

1. Boil 1/2 gallon of water per 1 1/2 lb. of grains to be steeped for 5 mins. 
2. Cool the water down to ambient, and add the cracked grains in a cloth grain bag. 
3. Let steep for 12 hrs. at ambient temperature, then rinse the grains in the bag with 1 pint of 170 F water at the same time as the rest of the mini-mash. 
4. Add to the rest of the mash in the brew kettle and begin the boil.

Cold steeping is similar to making an iced tea at room temperature overnight instead of boiling the leaves and letting the pitcher cool down afterwards. The cold mash that results is as black as dark roast espresso coffee and has a dark-unsweetened cocoa aroma. The flavor, as anticipated, is very mild. As black as the cold mash turned out, I wonder if I shouldn't have used 2X or 4X the black grains? The weakness of flavor in the cold steep also got me wondering if the lack of fermentable sugars might be throw my target style calculations, making the beer too low in alcohol to fit the IBA category. Digging back into my grain inventory, I found I had an unexpected extra pound of Weyermann Pilsner Malt crushed grains, which should make up for the weaker cold mash wort efficiency.

Self portrait in my brewing kettle thermometer. 

India Black Ale nears the end of its boil.

By yeast pitching time, the beer's OG was pretty high at 1.076, probably due to the 12 oz. of cane sugar in my recipe. This will probably get converted to a slightly higher alcohol level than my predicted 5.4%. The taste of the OG test beer was deliciously sweet, and slightly roasted, but more of a dark caramel than a burnt-peat stout in flavor. My hope is the final conditioned bottle of beer will taste somewhere between a HUB Secession for dryness and a Southern Tier Inequity for richness.


The yeast got so active by Sunday evening the carboy's temperature rose 5 ºF to a worrisome peak of 73 ºF. For a change I found myself packing ice around the fermenter then setting it outside on the freezing concrete front step before dawn just to cool it. By Monday morning I had brought the temperature back to a safe 68 ºF. Activity has begun to slow, and some of the chocolate mouse kräusen bubbles have begun to fall. In another five days, it will be time to start dry-hopping.

Create Your Own Beer Recipe

With three batches bottled, and either carbonating or conditioning, it must be time to brew again.

I decided to create my own recipe for a Cascadian or Northwest style organic Black IPA. My favorites include 21st Amendment Back in Black on the light end, through HUB Secession and Stone Sublimely Self Righteous in the middle, to Deschutes Hop in the Dark and Alaskan Double Black IPA on the high gravity end of things. And not to forget Pizza Port (Carlsbad) Big Black Poochie that is off the charts entirely.

In order to come up with a brew that I hope will blend the qualities I like best in these Black IPA style beers, I figured a good place to start would be to compare and combine the detailed clone recipes that ran recently in Brew Your Own Magazine Vol. 16, No. 4, and Zymurgy Magazine Vol. 33, No. 4.

Immediately, one realizes the clone recipes, while similar in output, are all totally different in ingredients and brew techniques. A few web searches turn up some ideas for the Stone and Deschutes examples, but in percentages rather than amounts. So, I take the Secession clone recipe from Brew as a base, then begin stretching and combining it with the information I can find on the homebrew forums for the others, along with some guesswork about substitutions of available organic grains, hops, and yeasts.

A Black IPA has specific targets for the style in ABV, IBUs, color, flavor, etc. And once I formulated my first draft of a recipe, I checked and adjusted it as closely as is possible to the guidelines, with The Beer Recipator online tool. I think the brew I first came up with would be closer to a whiskey than a beer - it was that heavy duty!

The great thing about the Recipator, and I'm sure other Beer Tools, is that you can tweak your recipes in many different directions to get the projected outcome to fit within style guidelines. Or, I suppose, you could also use the guidelines as merely a starting point for more individually expressive brews.

Since Cascadian (Black) IPA is a new style, you have to speculate about some of the target outcomes, but I think it has allowed me to come up with a recipe that will at least be close to the known style guidelines, and a starting point for building my ideal beer in future batches. I'm using a half pound each of flaked oats for smoothness, which I will roast before steeping, and flaked rye for aroma.

The Recipator lets you output a recipe formatted for sharing, like what you see below. Pretty slick.

Beer: Northern Lights Cascadian IPA

Style: India Pale Ale

Type: Extract w/grain

Size: 5 gallons

Color: 120 HCU (~40 SRM)

Bitterness: 62 IBU

OG:	1.062	FG:	1.018
Alcohol:	5.4% v/v (4.2% w/w)
Grain:	1.0 lb. Briess Organic Black Malt (500 ºL) cold steep 8.0 oz Weyermann Organic Carafa® 2 (dark chocolate) cold steep ___________________________________________________ 1 lb. Gambrinus Organic Pilsner Malt 1 lb. 1.0  lb. Weyermann Pilsner Malt 8 oz. Great Western Organic Munich Malt 8 oz. Great Western Organic Crystal 60 Malt (60 ºL) 4.0 oz Weyermann Organic Carafa® 2 (dark chocolate) 8 oz. Flaked oats 8 oz. Flaked rye
Boil:	60 minutes	SG 1.060	5.5 gallons
	6 lb. Light malt extract 8 oz. Cane sugar
Hops:	1 oz. American Bravo Organic Whole Hops (13.5% AA, 60 min.) .5 oz. Centennial (10.5% AA, 30 min.) .5 oz. American Summit Organic Whole Hops (13.5% AA, 30 min.) 1.0 oz. New Zealand Cascade Pellet Hops (5 mins) 1.0 oz. American Summit Pellet Hops (5 mins) .5 oz. New Zealand Cascade Pellet Hops (dry hop) 1 oz. American Summit Pellet Hops (dry hop)

Step by Step Partial Mash Brewing Instructions:

Make a yeast starter from the White Labs London Ale liquid yeast three days prior to pitching.

Steep the crushed grain in 2.0 gallons of water at 152 ºF for  30 to 60 minutes. Remove grains from the wort and sparge with 2.0 quarts of 170º water. Place mash in 7.5 gallon boil kettle and add 4.0 gallons of 210º water to make 6.5 gallons and bring to near boiling. Turn off heat and add the liquid malt extract and cane sugar. Boil for 60 minutes. While boiling, add the hops, Irish moss, and yeast nutrient as per the schedule. Cool wort to 68º and transfer to sanitized bottling bucket or primary fermenter.  Top off with cooled water to 5.0 gallons if necessary.

Pitch your yeast and aerate the wort heavily. Hold at 68 ºF for 7 days or until fermentation subsides.

When the primary fermentation is complete, rack beer to a carboy, avoiding any splashing to prevent aerating the beer and add the dry hops. Remove dry hops after 7 days then bottle or keg. Allow the beer to carbonate for one week at room temperature, then condition for 2 weeks at 50 ºF and enjoy your Northern Lights Cascadian IPA.