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.

So I tried our IPA (a very loose Bell’s Two Hearted Clone) and it’s just OK. It’s not fully carbonated yet so I’m sure that will improve it’s flavor a bit, but the real issue is that it’s real thin, way too bitter (even for me), and there’s a similar, very subtle flavor in there that I don’t care for, to what is in our Bitter (and works better in the Bitter).

Based on my present understanding of this stuff I’m assuming that flavor is most likely from the yeast we’ve been using or, possibly, that we’ve been using Chicago tap water. So for our next attempt at the Two Hearted Clone, I’m going to do a few things different:

1. Use distilled water
2. Use Centennial hops for the bittering (what Bell’s uses), though I’m going to stay with Cascade for the dry hopping as I really prefer it’s aroma and I’m pretty sure it’s what Half Acre uses, at least for aroma, on their Daisy Cutter.
3. Try a new kind of yeast, White Labs wlp051 California Ale yeast.

The use of the new yeast will hopefully help give our beer more body and help the taste a bit.  But, with using White Labs instead of the wyeast activator, I’ll now have to do a yeast starter in order to get the most from my vial of liquid yeast.  I poked around the internet a bit and found plenty of decent instructions on how to make a yeast starter.  I thought the nice folks over at AllGrainAles.com had one of the better and clearer instructions on how to do this.

Here’s how to make a yeast starter from your wort compliments of AllGrainAles.com:

Equipment Checklist:

- Clean glass bottle / jug (a growler works great)
- Bottle stopper
- Airlock
- 1/2 gallon spring water
- dry packaged brewing yeast or liquid yeast culture
- Funnel
- Medium-sized sauce pan
- 1/2 lb dry malt extract

As with all brewing procedures, it is crucial to maintain very sanitary conditions when handling yeast and all starting wort and equipment.

# Remove your yeast from refrigeration before beginning your mash on brew day.
# Draw off some wort during the sparging process (maybe a quart) and place in a medium-sized sauce pan. Check the gravity of this liqid and dilute to 1.020 – 1.030, if necessary. You’ll need about 1.75 quarts total.
# Boil this wort for 10-15 min. Reduce temperature (let it sit for 45 min. covered) and pour it (slowly) into a sterile 1/2-gallon jug (using a sterile funnel). Cap this with a stopper and airlock to maintain optimal conditions.
# Reduce and monitor temperature (running cold water against the jug) until it reaches 72°-74° F.
# Aerate this wort and add the room-temperature yeast.
# Mix and maintain temperature above 70° until it is added to the finished wort.