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http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=382700 Recipe Type: All Grain Yeast: Wyeast 2042 Yeast Starter: Yes - 4 liter.............use of a starter & liquid yeast... every time Original Gravity: 1.040 - 1.045 Final Gravity: 1.005 - 1.007 IBU: 10 - 14 Boiling Time (Minutes): 60 Color: 2 - 4 Primary Fermentation: 14 days @ 46* - 56* Degrees = Lager Secondary Fermentation?: 30 Days @ 34* - 39* Degrees = Lager Aged: Kegged, chilled, and Carb'd for one week = 7 days @ 39* We get our water from Folsom Lake, then it is purified by a water treatment plant. Our base profile here in Roseville. Ca = 6.5 = Calcium Mg = 2.6 = Magnesium Na = 2.6 = Sodium SO4 = 2.8 = Sulfate CL = 1.6 = Chloride HCO3 = 35 = Bicarbonate Typical add-ons: Gypsum CaSO4 Table Salt NaCl Epsom Salt MgSO4 Calcium Cloride CaCl Baking Soda NaHCO3 Chalk CaCO3 Other suggestions for German Lager yeasts include WL800, WL802, WL830.

Notes

By Drew Beechum: Be careful when adding Crystal Malt to anything. Never use more than 1 lbs. per 5 gallon batch. Sure it adds color, sweetness, & body but it masks other flavors & can add acidity too. Remember my experience with Bass & adding exta Crystal 60. Toasty = Maris Otter & Munic. Body = Oats & Wheat. Per BREW magazine: If you're brewing all-grain, you definitely want to tadjust the mash temperature to match the desired body of your beer. Mashing at a higher temperature like 156*F will result in a more malty beer and an increase in body and final gravity. Mashing at a low temperature, 148*F, results in a cleaner, drier finish to the beer with a lower final gravity. When brewing all grain recipes a lower mash temperature produces wort that ferments into a thinner bodied higher alcohol beer and a higher temperature mash produces wort that ferments into fuller bodied sweeter tasting beer. In my fourth year of home brewing I dove into brewing water properties and discovered how they influence the fermentation characteristics of wort. I also learned how brewing water properties can easily be adjusted to significantly improve the flavor, taste, color and quality of all my beers. Who knew? You can further improve the taste of your beer by increasing its malt flavor, while offsetting harsh bitterness, by adding a little Calcium Chloride and Epsom Salt to the same filtered, chlorine and chloride free water. I think of brewing water as a way to brighten the color and taste of my beer, in much the same way a treble control is used to increase the brightness of music during playback. It is true that water with high sulfate content enhances the sharp, bitter aspect of the hops, it's easily overdone. The result can be a chalky, metallic, or harsh character.. If you have soft water, add some Gypsum or Burton Salts, but start low, targeting half the amount of sulfate typical of Burton water. If you're really interested in learning more about creating the perfect brewing water profile visit the EZ Water Calculator site and download their free easy to use spreadsheet. It takes all the guesswork out of adjusting your water properties while keeping your additions within safe recommended ranges. There is a whole lot more to water chemistry, but you can begin to get your feet wet using just a few little tweaks and produce some really great beers. Most homebrews benefit from a simple addition of Gypsum & Calcium Cloride. This makes the hops pop! Adding anything else simply makes the beer taste more medicine like. Also, choosing which hops to use in a recipe is a lot simpler than choosing your grain bill. The overall amount of variation in flavor in hops is much less than in grains. When choosing hop varieties for established beer styles, review existing recipes and remember that, in general, classic beer styles are hopped with varieties from their country of origin. In other words, English beer uses English hops. German beers use German hops and so on. I judge the health of yeast by how quickly it ferments. To give your yeast every opportunity to thrive, always make a starter to maximize cell counts, increase your yeast's viability and achieve vigorous fermentation. Professionally, I like to see fermentation complete within four to six days for ale. As a homebrewer, you can shorten your fermentation timeline and create better beer with the use of a starter... every time. Tips To Optimize Dry Hop AromaPosted on HBT, May 22nd 2015 | By: Andrew J. Kazanovicz 1 - Use pellets 2 - Consider multiple varieties Much like salt and pepper, dry hop varietals often work best in tandem. Whether it's Simcoe and Amarillo, Citra and Centennial, Chinook and Cascade, or Nelson Sauvin and Columbus, dry hopping with two or more hop varieties can help create greater depth in your beers. But be careful not to overdo it! In fact, you may find you can detract from a desirable characteristic of one hop if overwhelmed with another. The key is finding the right balance 3 - Use multistage additions I have noticed a difference between beers I have dry hopped in one verses two (and even three!) stages. YMMV. 4 - Utilize warmer temperatures 5 - Optimize contact time Wolfe found that most commercial dry hopping regimens last anywhere between three days to one week, sometimes extending upwards of one month! Steele recommends limiting dry hopping to 5-15 days. Conversely, Brynildson does not exceed three days with any dry hop addition. Keep in mind many commercial breweries have the ability to rouse the hops, keeping them in suspension via hop cannon or torpedo-like devices. Unroused pellets will only achieve 3/4 of the overall aroma intensity as roused ones, peaking at four days 6 - Start in primary 7 - Minimize oxygen uptake As any experienced brewer knows, minimizing oxygen uptake post-fermentation is critical. For hop-forward beers it is essential! No matter how good your technique, the most common area where oxygen uptake is introduced is during racking. Reducing the total number of vessels (secondary fermenter, keg, and bottles) the beer matures in is one easy way to reduce oxygen uptake. Even better is purging all your racking equipment and vessels with a liberal amount of CO2 before transfer. 8 - Utilize late hopping/whirlpooling Research conducted in the late 2000's by Rock Bottom's Van Havig revealed that late hopping/whirlpooling may be more effective at achieving high levels of hop aroma than dry hopping. First, his data demonstrated that longer post-boil hop residence (whirlpool) resulted in more hop flavor, aroma, and perceived bitterness than shorter residence. Second, longer post boil residence resulted in more hop flavor than dry hopping alone; therefore hop flavor is best developed in the kettle. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, was the combination of late hopping and dry hopping resulted in greater aroma than dry hopping alone. 9 - Understand the law of diminishing returns Dry hop aroma doesn't increase exponentially with the addition of greater amounts of dry hops. In fact, Havig also demonstrated that brewers can reach a point of diminishing return with dry hops. Many commercial breweries report a dry hopping rate between 0.25-1.5 oz/gal (0.5-3 lb/bbl) with breweries such as Stone, Lagunitas, and New Belgium at the higher end of the spectrum, averaging to 0.5 oz/gal (1 lb/bbl). This is a good place to start, but I find best results at 1.5 oz/gal for my hoppy IPAs. Per HBT: For lagers, pitch your yeast cold (mid 40s to low 50s[F]) for better flavor. After the growth phase, raise the temperature incrementally.Ensure you have consistent pitching practices. Pitch the same amount of yeast at the same temperature each time you brew so you will have a good baseline. From there, you can experiment to find what works and doesn't work for you. So after you cool your wort with the emersion chiller to 80*, transfer to a carboy & chill it to 45* - 51* overnight in your chest freezer. THEN pitch your yeast. You've done a huge starter with a stir plate, cold crashed it in your fridge over a few days, nows the time to decant it, then pitch it. Pitching the yeast at the combined temperature of 45* - 51* avoids any stress & off flavors from the yeast fermentation. If you don't have access to a fridge for temperature control, putting a wet T-shirt over your carboy generally does a very good job at keeping the temp between 66-70[F]. This trick has saved my beers a number of times! Just wet the T-shirt down each day to make sure it stays cool. Also, ramping up fermentation temperature with a heat belt such as the Brew Belt or FermWrap when fermenting saisons makes a world of difference with regard to ester complexity. Whether heating or cooling, temp control can make or break an otherwise great recipe, so try to either brew with the seasons or control fermentation temperature in some way. A reptile heat pad is a great heat source if you are running a dual-stage controller or need to ferment at higher temperature than ambient. These heat pads are readily available, inexpensive, and work well for providing the small amounts of heat needed in an insulated environment like a chest freezer or fermentation chamber. For the cost and space-conscious brewer, secure a large bucket and place your fermenting vessel inside. Pour water into the bucket. The water surrounding your fermenter will drop the beer's temperature by three or four degrees [Fahrenheit] from ambient and minimize temperature fluctuations. If you want to lower the beer's temperature by up to eight degrees, freeze water in ziplock bags and drop them into the water in the bucket; switch out the ice bags every eight hours. The first five days of fermentation are the most crucial for flavor, so don't feel you have to spend two weeks switching out ice bags. Assuming you are not filtering, after fermentation, allow your beer the proper time to cold crash. Although your beer may look finished, there still may be some hop and yeast sediment that can give off unwanted flavors. I recommend at least 6 days. In the past I would rack to a secondary fermentation chamber just to clear my beer. The beer gurus are currently advising against it. Introducing oxigen and increasing the chance of infection are the main reasons why. My own experience has confirmed a much less dramatic result................. the beer left only in the primary to ferment & age just tastes better. So I cold crash for 6 days before I keg = solution for clarity & taste.