After spending eleven days in Austria in April, I have been itching to brew a Munich Helles. This is the standard style of beer served all across Bavaria and Austria; if you simply order a beer, you'll be served a Helles. My only problem brewing a lager is, my fermentation fridge sits in my garage, which is ridiculously hot during the summer. That little mini-fridge has no problem keeping my ales at 60-68* in the summer, but it really struggles to cool a fermenter down to 45-50* when the garage is 105. I found that with a fan blowing on the condenser coil the fridge was able to cool down to around 50*. With that sorted out, the brew day commenced.


I don't brew many lagers and I have zero experience with this style, so I pretty much brewed Jamil's recipe with a couple tweaks. I added a little Munich to his recipe, and I used a slightly different hop schedule. I started this batch off five days prior with a massive starter. Lagers typically need twice the pitch rate of ales, so I whipped up a 4QT starter of WLP838 - Southern German Lager. The starter fermented out in a couple days, and I crashed it in the kegerator for a few more days until I brewed.  This brew day went very smooth. I mashed for 60 minutes, then boiled for 90 to drive off any DMS. Chilling this wort down to 50* did take a while though, due to my 100* tap water. It ended up taking 20lbs of ice to hit my pitch temps. I fermented at 50* for 7 days, at which point the wort was down to 1.018. Then I raised the temp to 62* to help the yeast finish attenuating, and to clean up any diacetyl there may have been. It stayed there for one more week, then I kegged it, and allowed it to lager in the kegerator.