Curious about lager. Why do you do it?

[Simonh82]

I'm not going weigh in on why to brew a lager or not. One thing I will say is that I think cold conditioning can really benefit almost any beer.

If I have time, after about 10 days of fermentation I will cold crash my beers down to 3-4°C and leave them there for 5-7 days. If I don't bottle straight away after that, I will raise the temp to 8-11°C until I'm ready to bottle.

The beers that I have done this to really seem to improve in flavour and smooth out beautifully. I know a real lager is brewed at a cold temperature and then lagered at near freezing for several months sometimes but even my relatively brief cold conditioning seems to improve them.

 

[Sandimas]

Let's face it, the average lager (such as Carling) on tap in a UK pub is pants. The brewers deliberately brew it weak because of the UK reputation for quantity vs quality and drinking 10+ pints on a night out. If you go over to Eu and have the equivalent beer (e.g. Heineken) it's stronger and tastier.

I had an Australian friend over and he couldn't believe how bad our lager was, he brought a few tinnies with him and gave me one to try, the Australian Fosters was a completely different brew to ours, so much better.

It's good to see traditional ale breweries now having a go at lager e.g. St Austell Korev.

I like a hoppy lager so I usually do a Coopers batch with lots of Hallertau or Saaz.

 

[Mguthriem]

I thought lager was pointless until I visited Bavaria. Lager haas soooo much more potential than macro bud-esque crap.


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