Bayernbiere Bought and Drunk

Guessing Astra?

The German beer industry is going totally retro, the trend came right after everyone came out with a Kellerbier. Those who stuck with the 0.5 liter bottle look like geniuses now, and with all the talk of plastic particles in water, the trend in mineral water is back to the 0.7 liter "Perlenglasflasche" ... "pearl" glass bottle that was considered "dead" about 10-15 years ago. Crazy stuff.

 

oof. bought a crate of astra when I first moved to the hamburg area -- in part bc of the cool bottles. lordy...that beer. one of the worst. bought dithmarschen for bottles, too, at a later point. much, much better (and better than flensburger as well, by far...)

 

Funny thing is that FC St.Pauli is known for their leftist/communist fanbase, yet they have no problem shoving their money down Carlsberg/Holsten's throats................but.............Astra's marketing is so cool.........


And i like Dithmarscher as well, fairly cheap in my area too.

 

The mention of Beck's made me think of this video about the brewing process for Beck's, the narrator at 2:25 says that the fermentation lasts for about a week and the lagering for another seven (!) days. I had a few cans of Beck's a few months back since they were new to the monopoly and I was struck by how mild tasting it was, yet it was also extremely clean. You could tell that it was a German pilsner brand, but the flavors were dialed back compared to something like Bitburger. It reminded me of Holsten Edel which is an equally mild beer.

Hearing that they lager for seven days left me feeling both depressed and impressed.

 

I listened to a podcast where it was stated that Carling Lager (best selling beer in the UK) is lagered for 3 days at -1 degrees C. In that podcast there was mention that a student at UC – Davis was studying this topic for her Master’s Thesis. I am personally unaware whether this Thesis has been ‘published’ yet. If you find it please let me know.

Cheers

Edit: I changed the duration to "3 days' above after re-checking my notes.

 

1 day? That is quite something. Carling lager (with the listed abv of 4%, same as in UK prior to the tax ruckus in recent years which led them to admit the beer was 3.7% which is now the stated abv) was sold here a few years ago, for a brief period of time before it was delisted, and I count it as one of the worst tasting beers I've had, just had a dirty unclean flavor to it. Hearing that it is lagered for 1 day certainly puts that experience into perspective.

I'll keep a look out for that podcast and the master thesis, thanks for the tip.

 

It was 3 days. I corrected/edited my post above.

Cheers!

P.S. I have never tasted Carling Lager so I can provide no feedback there.

 

The three day duration made me have a flashback to this video of a brewing tour of Timothy Taylor, starting at 12:29: "One of the things that Taylor's do that sets them apart from alot of other breweries is mature their beer for longer than most"
Continuing from around 12:58 onwards: "It has been fermented for seven days, matured for three."

So Carling has I guess found success in treating their lager beer like their countrymen do their ale?

 

FWIW that is basically my homebrewing schedule for moderate gravity ales. After signs of fermentation (e.g., bubbling activity stops) I just let the beer 'sit' in the primary another few days. For my scale the fermentation typically happens more quickly (4-5 days) but the 'conditioning' phase of 3-4 days is a constant in my brewery.

As I understood the 'process' it is the very cold temperature (i.e., -1 degrees C) which fosters the shorter lagering time. I would encourage you to listen to the podcast for yourself and develop your own opinion on this topic.

Cheers!

 

Do you bottle or keg at that point? With bottling any bottle conditioning I personally would consider to be a secondary fermentation, or maturation, which in my case takes place for two weeks as we have talked about before.

I will definitely listen to the podcast. From my readings -1 degree C is not an unusual lagering temperature for modern day lager beer breweries, who may lager for weeks rather than days, which of course is hardly a long time period in an historical context. But once you drive the degree of attenuation high enough during primary (down to 2% plato or thereabout rather than 3.5%-5%), and the cellar temperature low enough during secondary to where the yeast can't function, what is it really that you achieve after one week vs after 8 weeks or 12 weeks? That's I guess the question at hand, and if Laura comes back with the result that 3 days of secondary at 2% plato extract at -1 C is no different from 90 days of secondary at 2% extract at -1 C, we may have learned something about modern lager beer brewing, but do we know how 90 days of secondary at 3.5%-5% plato at 2-3-4 C impacts the beer?

 

I prefer bottle conditioned beers so I am bottling at that point.

That is correct. I consider my ale homebrewing process as having three phases:

• Primary Fermantation (typically 4-5 days for a moderate gravity ale)
• Conditioning (3-4 'extra' days in the primary)
• Bottle Conditioning (which is a true secondary fermentation process)

I would encourage you to listen carefully to the podcast. Below is from my hand written notes (of 2017):

" lagering at -1 degrees C for 2 days is 'better' than lagering at 1 degree C for weeks"

Hopefully you can 'verify' this via your listening.

Cheers!

 

the only thing i can add to this bit of the discussion is that carling is indeed shite

 

I will add one aspect to the discussion.

Lagering cold will happen once the yeast have cleaned up byproducts of fermentation. The colder the better (don't freeze it), so -1C is fairly standard in modern lager breweries. Why, larger particles of yeast and protein form as the temperature gets colder. Stoke's law shows that larger particles will drop faster, so colder lagering means shorter lagering time.

The large lager breweries will filter their beers, except for Kellerbier and Wheat beers. Once the beer in a lagering tank hits their technical lab and sensory targets, it goes to the filter, this saves time too. I learned this last part on a tour of Ayinger. The time and temperature specs for lagering at Ayinger were not discussed, as far as I remember. The house yeast flocculation characteristics will also be a variable in the lagering time.

Hope this helps.

 

Maybe Weedy (@honkey) remembers this aspect from his education time in Germany?

Cheers!

 

Ayinger was not mentioned specifically in school. We were told that 2 weeks is a normal lagering period and that larger breweries typically lager less. So I would guess anything from 1-2 weeks

 

Drinking a new to me Festbier. Wieninger Höglwörther Festbier. 5.7% abv. This is the same beer as their Höglwörther Maifestbier I take it, apart from the slightly lower abv (5.7 vs 5.8%.). The beer is golden colored. The aroma is fresh, lightly malty and mildly hoppy. The hops are bright rather than herbal. The hop aroma reminds me a bit of Urban Chestnut Zwickel. The taste is sweetish pale malt, aromatic hops and a good balancing bitterness. It's very clean tasting. Yet another beer from a centuries old Bavarian brewery that I have never heard of making a solid German lager beer, and most likely their entire line up is of the same high quality. Yet their market is most likely very limited geographically. I imagine alot of these breweries survive on the loyalty of locals.

Kudos to them I say for keeping these kinds of breweries going.

 

This is for the OCD beeradvocate. I held the Höglwörther bottle in my hand and thought "this weighs more than the Hofbräu bottle I had earlier, how come, aren't they both NRW bottles?", so I decided to compare them against each other, and I threw in one of my NRW homebrew bottles as well. Turns out the Munich breweries use a shorter/lighter bottle compared with the true NRW mehrweg bottle.

 

I wonder if the point is true that Spaten is shifting over to becoming the export brand as Franziskaner begins making lager. Getting some Spaten Oktoberfest, I noticed that, rarely for German beer brands, their bottles are 12 oz. and not the standard European 11 oz. Not really a new process, though. Still, it suggests to me an emphasis on North American consumers over German ones.

Speaking of bottles, why have the Munich breweries shifted away from the NRW bottle? Does this involve the problem where reusable bottles are getting harder to source, because breweries like to use proprietary bottles nowadays? Or is this a new trend, with NRW’s being relegated to provincial breweries...or those whacky folksy Austrians?