We attempted to brew a Marzen a couple weeks ago. Everything seemed to go very well: we had a decent starch conversion, we sparged with 8 gallons of water that boiled down to a gorgeous brown/burgundy of 5.5 gallons of sweet liquor, and seemed to be ready to have a successful lager on our hands. I pitched in a vial of WLP838, we capped our carboy and put it away for it’s initial fermentation. Satisfied, we brushed off our hands and went on a several day New Years bender.
When we came back a week later it was disturbing to find that no fermentation had occurred. We checked back in a few more days and still there was no fermentation.
I poked around a couple forums – the Ale-luminati and BeerAdvocate – and found out, much to my dismay, from several very helpful beer geeks that for Lagers you *always* need to make a yeast starter and often a very large one.
To say the least I was bummed assuming we probably wrecked what seemed like was going to be our best batch of beer to date. But making beer is – or at least has been so far – a series of making and learning from every mistake that is possible to make while on the path to deliciousness. C’est la vie.
As part of this particular learning process a nice alcoholic on the BeerAdvocate forum recommended a helpful tool to me, Mr. Malty’s Yeast Pitching Calculator. You add in several different metrics like your O.G. your volume your yeast type, etc. and it will spit back at you the amount of yeast you need to use to properly get your beer fermenting.
What I discovered from Mr. Malty is that, for our particular brew, we should have had a yeast starter around 3/4 of a gallon, probably stepped up from a pint to the full 100oz. Good to know, but boy we shot on the short side of that.
In service of time we pitched in two more vials of yeast and let the bugger sit for another 5 days. It seems like we’re going to have a real yeasty brew, but we’ll see. We brought our beer down to 1.022 which should give us about a 3.2, added it to a keg to lager until Cubs opening day. We’ll see if it ferments down any more during lagering. I doubt it will, though, as with most everything else throughout this process I’m ready to be surprised and to learn a bit.