Friday, April 11, 2008

When Black Friday Comes

The thing I enjoy the most about this homebrew hobby is creating recipes. I'll just be going about my business, driving, eating, or performing some other exercise that can allow the mind to wander, and I'll start thinking about making a beer, doing research, and creating my own recipe. Unfortunately, most of these end up as a Word document stashed in my Beer Recipe folder.
I've been hankering for a good Pils style beer. I've got one in the fermenter, made with both the White Labs Czech-Budejovice yeast and the White Labs Pilsner yeast. It's a long story, but suffice to say that lagers do better with yeast starters.
So I googled "Pils beer recipe" today and found a listing with a recipe for a Black Pils. I was discussing Chris' Black IPA with my dad, and he told me that once, in Germany, he tasted a black pils. So this recipe piqued my interest. It's an extract recipe, though, and so I opened up Promash to see what kind of equivalent all-grain recipe it would be. As listed, they were a little low on gravity (I guess, I think they're using closer to 6 gallons of water, whereas I calculated the gravity based on 5 gallons). They calculated a 1.044, whereas I got 1.055. IBUs aren't as high as I would like in a Pils. I want it HOPPY. However, with my inexperience, my first shot was to put CTZ hops as the main boiling hop, but had to back off the ounces, since it was coming in at over 100 IBU. The combination below gives me an IBU between 60-62. So here's the recipe. I would appreciate your opinions:

Black Friday Pils
(All Grain Recipe)
5.5 - 6.0 gallon boil
7.0 lbs German Pilsner Malt
2.0 lbs CaraPils Dextrine Malt
4.0 oz Black Patent Malt
16.0 oz Crystal Malt 120L
1.5 oz Mt. Hood @ 60 minutes
1 oz Cascade @ 15 minutes
1 oz Cascade @ 2 minutes
Wyeast 2000 Budvar Yeast
Yeast Starter Recipe: 2.0 lbs DME, 4 liters of water
Original Gravity: 1.055-1.056

1 comment:

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