I always love brewing lagers when it’s cold. Living in South Louisiana it just seems easier to manage lager fermentation when it’s cold and the beer will be ready in time to start the Summer. So…given that some of the 2016 Bayou State Circuit homebrew competitions are sporting German Pilsner I went with that one. I decided to do 10 gallons and vary the yeast. One will be the bock strain of WLP833 while the other will be WLP830 or simply “German Lager Yeast”. I chose to go with straight Magnum because in the past when brewing this sort of beer I got comments concerning the beer being too hoppy. I suspect this is due to judges being used to trying pilsners which were not fresh from shipping across the ocean. We’ll see! The grain bill was simply Weyermann Pilsner malt which is supposed to be great for this.

The brew day went fine although the gravity was coming in a little high so I adjusted with tap water. Pitched the yeast in the very yellow wort. Fermenting at about 50F. Hopefully it comes out great because the wort tasted very nice.

Following this I’ll be using the yeast for schwarzbier and finally doppelbock.

Update 2/6/2016
The WLP830 version ended up being the best pilsner I’ve ever brewed. Professional quality clear, crisp, refreshing and drinkable by the liter. Very delicate with a fine head. The WLP833 is also better than any other pilsner I’ve ever brewed before but just a tad less clear and not quite as spot on for pilsner as the WLP830. So next time I brew this beer it’ll be the WLP830 along with some other like WLP838 Southern German Lager for example.

Update 4/7/2016
So much to my disappointment this beer didn’t place with comments being it needed more bitterness. Scoring was 37 on the points scale which is a win and still the only 30+ pilsner score I ever received so I’m happy about that. Point of this update is next time add more hopping. Possibly a small late hop addition.(although topping up 10% with water probably dropped bitterness some also) It was also commented that the carbonation should’ve been higher for a pilsner. Perhaps that contributed to the lower perceived bitterness. Carbonation will be the next issue I tackle since my beer comes out the kegs perfectly carbonated by transferring via the beer gun appears to lose some of that. So this beer only needs a very minor recipe tweak and I need to tune my carbonation to bottling process.