Advice with Lagering

[MerlotMark]

Hi all,

Earlier this month I decided to try my hand at brewing an AG lager for the first time. I'm pretty new to AG but I have a Bulldog Brewer which (when it's working!) makes the whole process fairly straightforward. I've brewed IPAs and a 'winter warmer' successfully but never a lager as I read how tricky they can be without a refrigeration unit or two!

Anyway, I brewed it on 13th December and put the fermenter in my spare room with the radiator turned off which kept it at a pretty consistent 14C. By 22nd the gravity had dropped from the OG of 1052 to a stable 1009. I then racked into a 2nd FV and transferred it to my garage which was around 8C at the time but, as the weather has got colder, is now about 1C and has been for about 3 days.

So now I'm not sure what the next step should be! Any advice? I'd like to be able to drink it by mid-Jan so I was thinking of bottling it now, adding priming sugar and leaving the bottles in the garage at the same temperature (1 to 3C at the moment). However, will whatever's left of the yeast be able to work with the priming sugar at those temperatures? Should I move the bottles to a warmer place for conditioning?

Thanks a lot for your help... any advice is welcome!

Cheers,
Mark

 

[mcphail]

Bringing it up above 18C for a while (maybe 2 weeks?) will help to get it carbonated, and might also help to get rid of any diacetyl. You can cool it down again after that.

The longer you can leave it, the less cloudy it is likely to be. You might want to add some gelatine if you're very thirsty and want to get stuck in as soon as possible.

 

[nigelnorris]

You'll need to move it somewhere warmer to carb up and condition. My own attempts at lagering have taken weeks to carb up, much longer than the ales I've made, but then I've lagered them for anything up to eight weeks. Not sure how much you'll have gained after only a week or so, if I were you I'd leave it there in the cold for as long as the weather stays right even if it meant missing the mid-jan drinking window.

The other thing is that depending on your choice of yeast you might have some diacetyl in there, most lager is given a day or two at 15C-20C to clean up after itself before being dropped down to lagering temps. I'm still fairly new to lager myself so I'll leave you to work out the fine print.

 

[cheapbrew]

Assuming you used a lager yeast, I would warm it up for a couple of days to 16-17c just to make sure you have no residual diacetyl, probably be ok as it was fermented at 14 anyway, then prime and bottle, and keep at 16/17 for a couple of weeks, then get as cold as you can but not freezing, it will be drinkable by the end of jan but better the end of feb