The First Lager! Warning: It is not done yet, not even by a longshot, so do not try this thinking it came out good until you see taste results written at the end!

I started looking for something like a dortmunder, bohemian, or vienna lager to make, and I have always thought about making a super cheap, lighter-bodied beer for everyday consumption, so I looked for recipes that had cheap ingredients... I decided to try dry yeast because of price, and The Pantry had "Superior Dry Lager Yeast on special for $0.79. I found most of the recipes used lager malted grain with a few additions like munich or vienna or cara-pils grain... one I saw had flaked corn also, so maybe we are heading to my love of that style beer also here... Hops would be what I had on hand, bullion for bittering, and wilWillamette for flavor and aroma. The $18 dollar cost of grains for a 10 gallon batch helps my try a lager for the first time without worrying too much about making funk-beer...

I ended up with:
75% lager malt
10% Munich Malt
5% Cara-Pils
10% Flaked Corn

I made up a promash recipe and decided the corn would make it possible to call it a cerveza, so Cerveza De Cotherman was born... I got home Friday evening and followed the yeast instructions of re-hydrating. I also boiled 1200ml of water and 8oz of DME, added in a teaspoon of Fermax, boiled and cooled, pitched the yeast when both were around 68 degrees in my beer room. The yeast, coincidentally, looked exactly like bread yeast. The next morning the starter looked like the best starter I had ever made, so Saturday was definitely going to be the brew day, besides, hurricane Jeanne was getting near...
I got everything together and put some water in the HLT and tested out the new temperature controller, and it did a wonderfull job of keeping 170 degree water. I doughed in and it only got 135 degrees, the grain must not have warmed up yet enough in the sun... uh-oh, i need to get to 153 degrees... I figure I will decoct a gallon off and heat it on the stove, but the sparge appearrs stuck... arrrrrggggghhhhhh.. where is that water heater element at I have lying around? I put a cord on it, dangled it in the mash, stirred the mash often, and in 30 min, it was at 154 degrees... hopefully the element did not kill too many of the enzymes...Because of the problem I had a delay of about an hour due to me trying to use a spigot that is for a bottling bucket, it has a smallish hole that combined with the 90 degree turn the spigot has was a sure-fire way to get a clog. I ended up transferring the 50lbs of mash to a cooler not once, but twice before figuring out what the deal was.... I put my old high-tech setup that consisted of a stopper with a piece of tube in it in the mash tun and lautered and sparged... actually, when transferring the mash back into the tun, I unknowingly spilled about a gallon of the high-gravity first run wort.. arrrrrggggghhhhhh.. I started the wort on the burner when I was at about 10 minutes away from being done sparging ans boiled, hopped, stirred, counterflow chilled to 80 on the way into a sankey fermenter.. I need a boil filter for the hot-break and hops that get through the hop bag. much later that night, when the wort was 68 and so was the starter, I pitched, I headed for the bed... whew...


Update - I kegged, tapped, bottled, drank, asked experts, looked online, etc and here are some notes:
It has a 'corn' taste, not due to the corn, but due to DMS, which is not totally unacceptable in BJCP Style 1 beer. All you ever wanted to know about DMS.
I believe I should have boiled it for 90 minutes not 60, and I will do that or more next time, along with making sure it is vigorous and uncovered. Here is a quote from the previous link "The half life or time needed to remove half of the DMS is 40 minutes so that three-fourths is removed in 90 minutes." It tastes like beer! Pretty good beer at that, but not perfect, it would be an amazing beer without the corn taste, I may try one or two batches of lager per year, a cerveza and an octoberfest.