↠ Tips on how to properly brew a good lager

How to easily make a great lager home brew

You might have heard that it's hard to home brew a good lager.

You might have heard beer kit lagers can be unforgiving beers to make and any mistakes will ruin the beer.

It's almost ironic that the world's most popular beer style is apparently too hard to make.

But, is this really the case?

What if I told you it was easy to make a great tasting kit lager brew?

Would you believe me?

The proof is in the tasting of course. Let me show you the secrets and tips of making a delicious lager from a beer kit.

I've made some great lagers and I look back fondly on the batch I called 'J' and just how good it came out. I was basically trying to make a Steinlager clone and it was truly superb.

If this backyard brewer can easily make a great lasting lager, you can too.

Are you ready for the secret of easily making a good lager?

Stop reading all the online nonsense and JUST BREW IT.

That's all you have to do. It's that easy a tip.

JUST BREW IT.

But just in case you think I'm pulling your leg, here's some tricks and tips for brewing lagers (and hard seltzer brews too).

Don't rush in like a school boy

The key to making a good lager is patience.

Even if you think fermentation is complete, let your lager beer rest a few more days longer in the fermenter.

It's a chemical process after all. 

It's very common for lagers to exhibit sulfur-like characters during fermentation (hence part of the rationale for people saying lagers are hard to brew).

Leaving your beer to sit for a bit longer will allow such characteristics to fade and largely disappear - which leaves you with a great tasting and smelling lager.

In the cold, cold night

In conjunction with time, lagers need the cold to condition and mature.

It's a lesson the Nordic people discovered long ago - they put their beer in cold caves over the winter and found they came out well ... lagered!

Indeed, the word lager actually means storeroom or warehouse so you can see how the cave thing / naming of the style happened.

Ideally, once you have bottled your lager, leave it in a warmish place to carbonate for a few days. If it's TOO cold at this stage, you won't get bubbles in your beer!

Once carbonation takes place, feel free to put your beer bottles in the garden shed for a few weeks where it's nice an cold.

For this reason, it's often considered good timing to make your lager near the end of autumn or the start of winter.

Keeping your lager cold will result in the production of fewer esters and fusel alcohols, giving your beer a better taste balance.

Expert brewers often refrigerate their lager.

Consider using well known lager yeasts 

It's a trait of lager that certain yeasts tend to suit being lagered. Your larger kit will come with a standard yeast - if you're feeling adventurous, you might want to order the Lager Yeast WL833 - it's a popular yeast for lager brewing.

Match your hops to well known lager hops

Saaz hops, in particular, are associated with the brewing of lagers as well as the classic German hop, Hallertauer . We've discovered New Zealand derived Green Bullet hop is also very handy.

Read more on good hop matches to beer.

You need to be  super vigilant with your sanitization

Ales are more forgiving than lagers, it's true.

The taste of an ale can overpower some of the niggles of brewing like unwanted smells.

So, to avoid these happen to your lager beer, the best cure is prevention.

That means being meticulously clean during the brew and ensuring your equipment is sanitized.

The tip here? Sanitize, sanitize and sanitize.

Remember what the word lager means! 

It means basically to store.

So once you have bottled your beer, leave it to store for as long as you can.

Maybe even over the whole of winter, in a cold place.

At a minimum three weeks but it could be worth leaving your lager alone for a couple of months.

Summary - how to easily brew a lager:

• Leave your brew to ferment a little longer than you would and ale
• Select a tried and true lager yeast
• Match with appropriate hops
• Watch your temperatures, especially post bottling for carbonation and conditioning.

So these have been a few basic tips that will help you easily make a fine tasting lager beer.

Forget the hysteria that it's hard to make a lager and JUST DO IT!

Review of Mangrove Jack's New Zealand Brewers Series Beer Kit

Review of Mangrove Jack's New Zealand Brewers Series beer pouch kit

I was in checking out Brewshop the other week and I saw that Mangrove Jack's (an Aussie based company) had a new kit on the market called the "New Zealand Brewer's Series".

This piqued my curiosity as what is uniquely New Zealand about beer kits? 

Other than Black Rock and Williams Warn both being made in the Speights factory, Nothing is the answer - so this means the kit is probably just a rebrand of their existing products for the NZ market.

I spied their Golden Ale, which purports to be "A clear golden ale with subtle malt and fruit undertones, finished with a pleasing bitterness."

At 20 NZ bucks, it was a competitive price so I thought I'd give it a brew and review.

So, what do we do first? I cleaned and sanitized the fermenter drum with boiling water and sodium percarbonate.

I then added the brew enhancer from Brewshop and added a kettle of boiling water.

I then opened the Mangrove Jack's box pack and to my surprise, it was actually a pouch inside the box.

This actually should have been no surprise as Mangrove Jack's are well known for their kits being in pouch form rather than tin can!

I cut open the pouch with my key chain multi-tool and added the contents to the drum. Perhaps the kit's contents were a bit cold as I really had to squeeze it out.

Indeed, I felt there was quite a lot left in the pouch so I added some boiling water to it to help melt the remainder and made sure I got most of it out it and into the wort.

This process was a bit more difficult than doing it with a tin can kit. I venture a complete novice at brewing would have made a huge mess!

I then gave it all a good stir and then added water so that there were about 23 liters in the drum. I then added the yeast that I had set aside in a glass of warm water to help hydrate it.

I noticed when adding the yeast that it all came out pretty easily and there were not many bits of it stuck to the inside of the packet (which happens a lot with Blackrock kits for example).

I then chucked the drum into the shed.

It's currently the start of winter so it will be a bit cold out there so we'll see how the fermentation goes!

Let's check back in about ten days after primary fermentation.

...and we're back.

It's actually been two whole weeks and tonight I have just bottled the beer. Instead of batch priming, I sugared each bottle individually. This is because I have somehow managed to over prime my last two stouts and those were some wee fizzy buggers which kind of ruined the beer drinking experience.

So, let's check back in another two weeks for a taste test.

...and we're back.

Honestly, this is an 'average' result. Not average in the sense people say that word to not mean good but average in the mathematical sense. It's not an inspiring brew by any means however it feels like a stock standard beer.

Another two weeks conditioning will improve this beer but I've made enough of these brews to know where the beer is headed.

It's flavour would definitely have been improved by the addition of some English or Citrus type hops.

So, what we've got here is a good result in the sense this Mangrove's Jack offering is a stock standard homebrew kit and for the price, you can't complain if that's the kind of beer you want to make!

If you want to try a different kind of brewing experiment, consider brewing with two malt kits at the same time!