Recipe All Grain Bi-Winning Pilsener. BIAB

I stuck with the Charlie Sheen theme for this beer which is also my first ever Pilsener, it's a hard enough style, but I now own a lagering freezer which I shall also detail in a future post.
14kg Weyermanns Pilsener malt
145g Saaz @ 90 mins
50g Saaz @ 60 mins
50g Saaz @ 30 mins
To 23.5 IBU

I ended up with 55l of 1.050 wort.


I treated the water with CRS and DLS to get the levels just right.
I got the hardness down to about 20ppm CaCO3 and increased the Calcium to about 110 ppm as per instructions elsewhere.

I had to add back 10l of water which I had reduced the hardness of, I didn't bother to add the salts as it was post mash. This was because I was worried about the evaporation and losing too much beer and it being too strong. After the extra addition I go to where I wanted to be.


Hot break, small flecks in the brew.

Rolling boil.

Scum skimmed off the boil

It was then pitched with a large starter of Budwar yeast WLP802, made from three vials pitched on 20l of starter wort. Yeast was allowed to drop out and then the wort poured off the top and just the sludge pitched.

This is still in my lagering fridge and will be bottled shortly. The only issue with it is that the starter was not made at lager temperatures and there was a little too much wort transferred with it and it's put a small tang of banana/clove in the final pils. I'm hoping to get rid of this when I bottle and use the "krausening" technique to do the priming. I'll detail this at a later stage.