I have a recipe that I make relatively often and there are the occasional tweaks whether with regard to grain, hops, yeast or water composition. They’re all very close but often just a little different. I did not make this beer as something “for the season” because I make a lot of festbiers, marzens and viennas all year long so it was just made because I wanted to make it. I will be letting it lager for another month or two. But I sampled it with a cobra tap just now and WOW, is this going to be an awesome, simple festbier. Some might say it’s not simple enough but you be the judge…
[b]Therese’s Weisn Oktoberfest
5 lbs Best Malz Munich 10L
4.50 lbs Best Malz Pilsner
2 ounces Belgian Aromatic
2 ounces Belgian CaraMunich
1.3 ounces Hallertau pellets @ 4.3% plus .25 oz Tettnanger pellets @ 3.9% for 60 minutes (6.6 AAU)
Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager yeast
I mashed at 150.7°, single infusion for 60 mins. I diluted my bicarb-heavy water with 25% distilled water and added 1g of gypsum and 2g of CaCl to the mash for final water numbers of Ca 51, Mg 9, Na 10, Cl 48, SO4 39, Bicarb 85. I occasionally make a beer like this with 2308 or 2206 but I just love the way it comes out with 2124. It’s got that German-grainy aroma and flavor which must come from the Munich 10. It’s light in color as many of the German festbiers are now. It will be hard not to sneak a few of these with the cobra tap but I know it will be even better with a month or two of lagering. I’ll try to snap a pic when it’s ready to go. Cheers Beerheads.
Sounds delicious, Ken. Tonight I have been happily sampling Festbeir offerings of Weinhenstephenen and Ayinger at my local. It’s all good and yours sounds very nice. The German dark Munich is a favorite of mine. :cheers:
That does sound delicious Ken, and I really like the relative simplicity of your recipe.
After continually putting it off, I finally had Ward Labs do an analysis of my water a couple weeks ago, and lo and behold it looks as though my tap water (after carbon filtering) is, overall, amazingly close in numbers to the final water profile you employed to make this brew.
The IBUs and OG of the beer are both in a range I seem to favor these days, so with my next brewday is coming up it looks like I’m going to have to give your formula a try.
I loves me a good festbier!
It’s great when the local places get some good festbier. I had some draft Paulaner the other night and I have Spaten and Hofbrau in the bar fridge![/quote]
[quote=“The Professor”]That does sound delicious Ken, and I really like the relative simplicity of your recipe.
After continually putting it off, I finally had Ward Labs do an analysis of my water a couple weeks ago, and lo and behold it looks as though my tap water (after carbon filtering) is, overall, amazingly close in numbers to the final water profile you employed to make this brew.
The IBUs and OG of the beer are both in a range I seem to favor these days, so with my next brewday is coming up it looks like I’m going to have to give your formula a try.
I loves me a good festbier![/quote]
I like a good, simple festbier and it seems like the American breweries always have to make them sweeter or with a bunch of crystal malt. A good Munich 10L like Best Malz or Weyermann produce such a nice, malty base for this beer so making it darker or sweeter just doesn’t seem right. There is a commercial on now for Sam Adams Oktober where the people are drinking it and calling it “heaven in a glass” or whatever and one of the people say, “it’s so caramelly!” or something along those lines. I don’t know if that’s bad or good but I don’t think ‘caramelly’ is a good descriptor for a festbier. I actually thought that Leinie’s Oktoberfest was good this year. It’s not mentioned very often by beerheads. If you’re looking to make a simple festbier, try this recipe. Cheers!
