Improving a Coopers Australian lager

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mike-os

mike-os

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right, having dry hopped a youngs lager kit with great results i am keen to try more...

So i am considering adding a hop tea to a coopers australian lager kit

as I like pils/lager tastes I was considering using half the hops from a Czech lager recipe..

can i just boil hops to get bittering/flavour?
 
I have an Australian lager in the FV right now. I boiled some Saaz hops in 1 litre of water and added this to the FV at the start. Plan on dry hopping with more Saaz 4 days before bottling. If you are looking for a Czech style lager then saaz would be a good choice of hop
 
thats what i thought...

thinking couple of litres water

Magnum 4g for 60min
saaz 10g 30 min
saaz 14g 10 min
magnum 4g 10 min
saaz 15g 0 min

leave to cool

add to can with BE2 or DME and make up volume

taste and possibly dry hop saaz 25-30g for 5 days

OTT? just wrong?

or Probably OK?
 
Can't really comment on the receipe itself but I'd cool the boiled hops and water in the sink (with some ice) repeatedly changing the water.
The reason being is that hop oils are volatile and if you just leave the hop tea to cool on it's own the steam from the boiling water will carry the volotile oils away. You can put a lid on the top of course but I'd still try and cool it down as fast as you can.
 
Yes of course... i usually fill the sink with icewater

hopp recipe is half the hops from a czech lager recipe... working on the theory that there is some flavour from the original kit ....
 
You can find out the exact IBUs for a Coopers kit and then work out sensible hop additions from there using brewing software, you can probably drop the 60 minute and possibly 30min additions completely and focus on aroma and dry hopping as the kit should provide a suitable base level of bitterness for a lager already (but you can still tweak this up a bit with short boiled hops).
 
HisDudeness said:
You can find out the exact IBUs for a Coopers kit and then work out sensible hop additions from there using brewing software, you can probably drop the 60 minute and possibly 30min additions completely and focus on aroma and dry hopping as the kit should provide a suitable base level of bitterness for a lager already (but you can still tweak this up a bit with short boiled hops).
Click to expand...

clibit said:
Coopers do provide the IBUs of their cans:

Coopers Kits

Lager 90 EBC 390 IBU
Draught 130 EBC 420 IBU
Real Ale 230 EBC 560 IBU
Bitter 420 EBC 620 IBU
Dark Ale 550 EBC 590 IBU
Stout 1800 EBC 710 IBU
Canadian Blonde 70 EBC 420 IBU
Bavarian Lager 90 EBC 390 IBU
Mexican Cerveza 53 EBC 300 IBU
Australian Pale Ale 90 EBC 340 IBU

This is for the concentrated form in the can - to get the figure for 20 litres: multiply by 1.25 and divide by 20.

Just add that figure to the IBUs from your hop additions, yes.
Click to expand...

..........................................
 
Cheers MyQul I meant to link to that post myself but forgot! Just to muddy the water slightly there appears to be 2 versions of this formula going around, on Coopers website they give it as 1.7 * kit total IBU / final volume in litres. As such Aussie lager would come out at 28 ibu 1.7*390/23, this does kind of make more sense to me as the 1.7 is the weight of the kit and I didn't really understand where 1.25 came from
 
Addendum

Tried an Australian I had bottled 3-4 weeks ago... can't believe the improvement a week has made

Bittering is much better... or possibly is no longer masked by the sweet fruity flavour which has faded a lot...

so perhaps just a saaz addition to add some aroma?
 
As noted earlier I added a Saaz hop tea to mine, think it was about a 15min boil I did. Been in the FV for 13 days now, SG 1.012 so dry hopped with more Saaz last night and will bottle at the weekend.

The sample I had last night had a pretty good level of bitterness, certainly not too much but enough to make it fairly prominent. Other than that it tasted like a run of the mill lager (difficult to get too excited about a small test tube of warm flat beer!), hopefully the dry hopping will add a little more interest.
 

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