Lagering advice

[Regfixit]

I'm making my first lager, which is also my first all grain brew, and am wondering about the lagering process.
It finished fermenting, since which it has been in the conical at 6C for coming up to 4 weeks. I dumped the yeast a couple of weeks ago.
I just tried a sample and it tastes very nice, but as you can see is still quite cloudy

I am itching to get my conical back into use and just purchased a second hand fridge yesterday so I have the opportunity to transfer to corny and put in the fridge.
I would really like to end up with a very clear lager and am wondering if I should just keep going with it in the fridge and it will eventually clear, or if it should have already cleared and maybe I need to think about
a) adding some finings
b) filtering it ( I have a 1 micron paper filter I could use)
c) just accepting this is a cloudy beer maybe from my brewing process

Is the purpose of the long lagering times to clear the beer, or to improve its taste because if the latter, I am quite happy with the taste now and thinking about trying to expedite the clearing.

I read the Brulusophy method which says to hold at 0C for 3-5 days to clear. I've got it as 6C so maybe it needs to be colder ?
That method also seems to suggest at most 2 weeks lagering is all that is needed, so with mine at 4 weeks I am wondering.

Then again, on the Grainfather instructions for the conical it mentions:
. Hold at one of the lagering temperatures below for conditioning. a. 3-4 weeks at 7°C (45°F) b. 5-6 weeks at 4°C (40°F) c. 7-8 weeks at 2°C (35°F) Unneeded due to finings and very low yeast activity.

So I'm confused !

 

[NotSure]

I make a few lagers a year and I find that after 4 weeks, almost every one of my beers were clear. The ones that weren't clear ended-up clearing mid-way through draining the keg. I also keep the temperature as close to zero as possible. 6C seems a bit warm to me for lagering since I thought 3-4C was the max you'd want to do, but I could be wrong.

I did try filtering a few times years ago and it didn't work as well as I thought it would. It was also messy and wasted CO2. Plus, you run the risk of oxidation. For me, time and temperature make all the difference in getting clear beer.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Did you use finings?

 

[NotSure]

Did you use finings?

Only copper finings (Irish Moss)

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Only copper finings (Irish Moss)

I haven't tried it myself, but apparently gelatine finings should work well; and should be used after the fermentation. Have a read of this... The Gelatin Effect | exBEERiment Results!

 

[Benfleet Brewery]

I haven't tried it myself, but apparently gelatine finings should work well; and should be used after the fermentation. Have a read of this... The Gelatin Effect | exBEERiment Results!

I used Gelatine following this method on my last lager which was kegged four days ago and I had enough left in the FV for this one bottle.

 

[An Ankoù]

Bottle it up and don't touch it until September. Lager means storage, otherwise you're drinking light ale.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

I used Gelatine following this method on my last lager which was kegged four days ago and I had enough left in the FV for this one bottle.

View attachment 47545

Cor... that looks fantastic - please could you tell me which type (of gelatine) you used and where you got it from?

 

[Benfleet Brewery]

Cor... that looks fantastic - please could you tell me which type (of gelatine) you used and where you got it from?

Thanks. This one.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Is the purpose of the long lagering times to clear the beer, or to improve its taste

Both - but there's diminishing returns so I wouldn't get too hung up on it.

There's two main types of haze in beer :

Negatively-charged crud - mostly yeast, which needs positively-charged finings like isinglass and gelatine to cancel out its mutual repulsion so that it agglomerates and then drops out

Positively-charged crud - mostly protein, which needs negatively-charged auxiliary finings like Irish moss to help them floc together and drop out.

Obviously you can't add the two types of finings at the same time as they will just neutralise each other, which is why Irish moss is generally added in the boil and gelatine/isinglass added after yeast has done its job.

Protein can be a tricky one, some varieties of barley have more than others, and grain protein can also depend on the weather - the extreme weather in recent years has seen malting barley going above the usual specifications for protein in some cases. I normally don't bother with finings, but I've been working through a sack of Baird's pale malt which has been a complete PITA for haze.

The rate at which things drop out depends on temperature - commercial brewers will often chill their beers to below 0C to make sure that there's no chill haze when they are served at 4C.

What yeast did you use? Things like 34/70 aren't the best at dropping out, something like WLP800 or M54 California flocculate much better (although M54 is a bit of a Marmite strain, some people love it and some don't).

Bottle it up and don't touch it until September. Lager means storage, otherwise you're drinking light ale.

Well if you're going to be originalist about it, then ale implies no hops are being used.

It gets incredibly messy trying to define these things - would you say anything that's been "stored" for 2 days is a lager? Because it's true on a literal basis. And trying to define by yeast type doesn't really work either, once you get into the detail of the yeasts that get used. I'd suggest "I know one when I drink it" is about the best you can do for lager.

 

[Regfixit]

Thanks all for your input and advice. Yes I used Saflager 34/70. I used Irish Moss in the boil, so I've cranked the cooling up(down?) to 3C which is a low as I can get my conical with my beer cooler, and added some Youngs beer finings. My aim is really to get this to drinking stage and learn from the experience so I don't want to wait until September.

It's already not a true lager as I had a few hiccups in the process (it is my first all grain attempt). First off I got the water amounts off as I was aiming for 23 L but with 20 min boil time left it was still 30L in the pot so I started taking portions off into stock pots and boiling them up on my induction hob to reduce the water down.

At the end I did get it down to 23L, but the OG was a lot lower than I was aiming for. My recipe was 5Kg Pilsner Malt and 100g Saaz Hops and target OG 1.049, but I think I ended up with around 1.040 so I added some DME to bring it up to 1.048.

As it still tastes nice I'm hoping to get it drunk and brew some more with better water levels initially and perhaps increase the grain bill.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

As it still tastes nice I'm hoping to get it drunk

At the end of the day, that's all that really matters :-)

Well done with your first brew - and all of us are still learning

 

[Northern_Brewer]

At the end I did get it down to 23L, but the OG was a lot lower than I was aiming for. My recipe was 5Kg Pilsner Malt and 100g Saaz Hops and target OG 1.049, but I think I ended up with around 1.040

Don't worry about that, it's completely normal for your first 2-3 brews to come in on the low side - and most people don't have some DME in stock to boost it up again!

You can get an idea of your brewhouse efficiency here :
https://www.brewersfriend.com/brewhouse-efficiency/That tells you how much of the potential sugar in your malt has ended up in your wort. Somewhere around 70-75% brewhouse efficiency is pretty typical for BIAB, if you got 23 litres of 1.040 from 5kg of pilsner then you got about 61% which is completely normal for a first time. Things like better sparging, and a moderate squeezing of the bag will help recover more sugar.

Yes I used Saflager 34/70.

34/70 is the most used yeast in the world, Saaz is the original lager hop so they are a classic combination and I completely understand why you'd want to start with them. But they're not the most straightforward ingredients to brew with - 34/70 isn't the best flocculator and the low alpha of Saaz means you need a lot of them for a given IBUs compared to more recent varieties bred for bittering. So you might want to consider using a higher-alpha variety for bittering next time. But they're not expensive and at a homebrew level it's convenient and maximises quality to use a 100g pack per brew, without open packs hanging round the freezer.

But you might want to play with better-floccing yeast like M54, or even Nottingham fermented fairly cool and see whether they are to your taste. Certainly no need to go to liquid yeast at this stage, it's another thing to worry about when you're feeling your way around the basic processes, and dry yeast are more convenient.

As it still tastes nice

That and having fun are all that really matters - don't worry too much about anything else.

It certainly doesn't matter what the purists call a beer, in the commercial world there are "lagers" fermented with ale yeasts, even members of the saison family. The label doesn't matter, the flavour does.