Brewing a Bavarian Helles

[mpietropaoli]

Our first stab! Frühschoppen helles... it's much clearer than it looks, there's a good bit of condensation.

We did have to force carb, as we missed out window on spunding, and actually may have had o2 pickup on the cold side, but still, really really solid. The carb is still a little rough (fountain soda vs. bottled) because of the force carb, but man this is excellent.



Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

[Brandon]

[KingBrianI]

Hey guys, this is my first post on this forum. I also read the LODO Helles article a few weeks ago and it really caught my attention. So much so that last week I attempted my first LODO beer, an APA, as that was what I planned to brew next anyway. I had a few issues during brewday that may have introduced some O2, but I have no O2 meter to confirm (I tried a 100% liquor addition, no-sparge mash on my GrainFather to eliminate O2 pickup during the sparge, but filling the GF up that much caused circulation to go around the malt tube instead of through it, so conversion took longer than I wanted and thus might have increased O2 exposure). Anyway, this weekend I'll be brewing the Helles recipe as stated in the paper, and that's where a couple questions come in.

1. My LHBS didn't have any of the recommended yeast varieties, so I ended up with WLP833 Bock Lager. It was the only strain the store had in stock that the White Labs poster recommended for Helles. Does anyone have experience with this strain and should I still follow the cold-temperature fermentation as described in the paper?

2. How do you take samples from the fermenter without introducing O2? I use the stainless brew bucket that I think I've seen some of the others on this forum use with the conical bottom and ball valve. I took a sample of the APA that's fermenting right now and opened the ball valve slowly only taking enough beer at a time to move the bubble in the S-airlock down and stopping before it sucked the air through, then waiting for it to rise again before slowly pulling more. Is there a better way? I'm sure some of you can hook up CO2 to the fermenter to push a sample, but I don't have that capability at the moment.

3. I'm hoping to catch the Helles ferment early enough to spund in the keg, but the fast ferment of the APA (plus me trying to dry hop while fermenting) means the sample was already down to 4 pts above my predicted FG, and I want to give the dry hops at least a day or two before racking into the keg. That means I'll need to prime the keg with some sugar to get that yeast active again, but I haven't figured out a good way to introduce the sugar to the keg if it is filled with sanitizer and flushed with CO2. Maybe a funnel and a tube connected to the liquid out port, being sure to purge the line with the sugar solution before attaching it to the ball valve post, and disconnecting before the last of the sugar solution went through the tube?

4. When transferring beer to the keg for spunding, how do you know when the level has reached the bottom of the shortened gas in tube? Or do you keep the flow going until it comes out the gas post, then attach a CO2 line to the liquid out post and blow the excess beer out of the gas post before attaching the spunding valve?

Anyway, sorry for all the questions. I'm excited by the possibilities of this new technique. A question was asked a few pages back about why there was so much resistance to the technique on other forums and while I can't say for certain, and disagree with most of it, I can tell you what my first impression was when reading the paper. "Shit!" That's what I thought. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, but also pretty damn lazy, the paper suggested that my beer would never be as good as I'm striving for unless I did all of this tedious BS. Having traveled to Germany many times for work, I immediately recognized the "it" that has been described, and could immediately relate to and believe in the principals being discussed. But what a hassle it would be! A few days later I read the paper again, then again. Possibilities started going through my head. I could make this change easy enough, or that change wouldn't be that hard. To the point that within a week or so, I had implemented almost all the recommendations with no real investment except for a spunding valve. I'm still using a copper counterflow chiller, but I think the rest of my process is pretty solid. So we'll see how it goes. The gravity sample of the APA definitely tasted good, and quite possibly had "it" though there were enough yeast and hop flavors going on to make it difficult to tell. Hopefully the Helles is more telling. We'll see. Thank you to everyone who helped develop the technique and then present it to the world as well as any of you that attempt to help with any of my many questions!

[Brody]

[Ski]

Hi KingBrianI, delighted to see you over here. I've been following your thread on brewing English ales closely on HBT, and I've had great success with my ales since. Good luck with the Helles. I'll be trying out my first proper LODO in the next few days. (I used SMB and pre-boiled for my last batch, and it made a huge difference, but I've realised there are so many areas that I needed to improve to get a true LODO brew.) I'll probably go with an ale again. Lagers seem like a very big step. Once I get a nice flavoursome LODO English ale under my belt, I'll start thinking about the Helles.

[mpietropaoli]

[KingBrianI]

[KingBrianI]

[KingBrianI]

[Brandon]