Dark Lager Tropical Stout

This one is very difficult to categorise.

Brewing a dark lager… Of all the beer I brew, and of all the recipes I’ve come up with, this is by far the most difficult to fit into a category. It’s almost got enough elements of crystal malts, dark malt and candi sugar to make it a Tropical stout, but not quite, and yet the sugar and the lager yeast lighten up the beer in a way that makes it extremely easy to drink. And at 5.7% alcohol, you can have a good few at a summer BBQ without falling over….

Let’s start with the recipe.

Dark Lager Recipe Ingredients

Measuring up

Let’s get going, and measure out the grains.

Then mill them down with the MattMill Master. I’m milling at a 1.1mm gap setting, which i find is about the optimum for the Braumeister system.

Being a “cost of living crisis” and all, and the fact that we’ve got the wood burner going for winter, I’ve put most of the mash water on the wood stove to pre-heat before transferring to the Braumeister.

Whilst the water is pre-heating, we’ll measure out 5.7 grams Gypsum and 6.6 grams Calcium Chloride (SO4 146ppm/Cl 145ppm). This is quite a high mineral water profile. It’s a profile I use regularly with dark sweet beers. Conventional wisdom is that if we’re using 150 ppm or higher of sulfates, then the chloride level should be under 50 ppm to avoid a minerally finish to the beer. We’re not quite at 150 ppm SO4, but pretty much. However, I find that in dark sweet beers, the minerally finish also leaves a slight dryness, which neutralises any cloying sweetness, and makes you want to come back for another sip. Also, the calcium helps to lower the ph level.

Start the mash

Once the water is heated and in the Braumeister, we’ll add in the grains….

….give it all a good stir to get out any dough balls lurking at the bottom….

…and put the filters on the top. I’ve got three magnets holding the fine filter up against the course filter at the top. This helps mostly for when I I am doing a decoction mash, as it means I can can pull the filters out in one go, and i don’t have to dig around to find the fine filter in amongst the grains.

With everything in place, this gets started on a 60 minute mash at 67 degrees centigrade.

While we’re waiting for the mash to complete, It’s time to weigh out the hops. It’s a simple hop addition at 60 minutes. It’s really just a bittering addition as there’s no real hop character in the finished beer. However, the slightly spicy and floral notes that the EKG give, will work well with this grain bill if it’s noticable.

We’ll also weigh out the 330g of Belgian Candi Sugar. If you’re interested to find out how to make this yourself, then follow the link here or have a look at the ingredients section later.

The Boil

Once we have a rolling boil, we’ll add the hops and sugar to the hops basket. I like to dissolve the candi sugar in the basket, rather than just throw it in the kettle. This way it dissolves and mixes well, rather than just ending up in a big lump stuck to the bottom of the kettle.

The boil length is going to be for a standard 1 hour.

Toward the end of the boil, I’ve put the immersion coil chiller in. This allows it to be sanitised by the boiling action.

Chilling the wort

The chilling coil is connected up to hoses and I’m running water through it, to bring the temperature down to our pitching temperature of 10 degrees c. Obviously how close we can get to this temperature will depend on the ground water temperature at the time. Nonetheless, we’ll get as close as we can, and then once the wort is in the fermentor, we can bring the temperature down with the glycol chiller.

While that’s cooling, it’s a good time to re-hydrate the yeast. I’m using Mangrove Jacks M76 Bavarian Lager yeast. I find this is a great dried lager yeast, I get impeccable results every time I use it. It’s clean, neutral and predictable. It’s also easy to clear before bottling. There may be better liquid yeasts, but I find as a dried alternative that I don’t need to plan ahead for, this is as good as I’ve found. Mangrove Jacks don’t want you to re-pitch their yeasts for whatever reason, however, I harvest and re-pitch this up to three times on a regular basis with no loss of quality.

I’m adding two packets to 200 ml of 20 degree c water.

Cover it over and let it re-hydrate for 20 minutes or so.

A quick test of the OG and it comes up as 1.052, which is what was predicted by the Beersmith software.

20 minutes later, and it’s time to add the yeast to the keg fermentor…

….and transfer in the cooled wort. There’s plenty of splashing to oxygenate the wort, plus dried yeast doesn’t need oxygen added so much, so I’m not going to use the oxygen wand in this.

Fermentation

After 3 weeks fermenting at 10 degrees c and a further week of D-rest at 18 degrees c, the pressure on the spunding valve is at about 11 psi.

With no further signs of fermentation, I’ve dropped the temperature to 3 degrees c for a few days of cold crashing. This helps to drop the remaining yeast out and also for the beer to re-absorb the CO2 in the head-space.

After a few days cold crashing, the pressure is down to around 6 psi.

Now it’s time to gravity transfer to the Unitank for clearing, carbonating and bottling. It’s a closed transfer to eliminate oxygenation and staling of the dark lager. This is a key to creating any beer, but especially important with a clean tasting lager.

Bottling

The beer has been fined with gelatine and carbonated to 2.8 volumes CO2. We’re bottling below with the Blichmann beer gun, and after bottling, I estimate we have around 2.4 volumes CO2 in the bottle.

After a week of further conditioning in the bottle, it’s time to se how it tastes.

The Tasting

And it tastes fantastic. It could do with a few more weeks to condition, and it gets a better head retention as it ages as well, but it’s one of the few beers that is excellent straight from the get go.

The initial taste is sweet, with caramel, toffee and dark fruit being the dominant flavours, this then fades to malty and is then overtaken by the roasted barley, which drys out the end of the sip. This roast dryness coupled with the slight drying of the mineral profile, clears any sort of sweetness which could otherwise end as cloying, and instead, it makes you want to go back for another sip and more of the sweet initial taste.

As expected, the yeast plays little part in the flavour profile, but instead, being a lager, it gives a light crisp background profile for the malts and sugars to shine through.

I guess it’s a Dark Lager Tropical Stout.

This is a favorite beer here at the farm, and if you try this one yourself, then I hope it will become one of yours as well.

If you want to see the full brewday video, click here to see it on YouTube. If you like it, please subscribe, and if you try brewing this yourself, leave a comment there and let me know how it went.