Sunday, March 25, 2007

Clonebrew: Pilsner Urquell

I decided it was time for another batch of beer and turned again to my copy of Clonebrews for the Pilsner Urquell recipe. If you've never had Pilsner Urquell (PU...heh), it's an awesome beer. It's the pilsner after which all other pilsners were copied, and it's said that PU was the first beer to be golden colored instead of dark. Pilsner Urquell is from Plzen (Pilsen) in the Czech Republic.

The procedure for this one would be similar to the Bitburger recipe, and in fact, the ingredients are similar, except for the hops. Once again, I had to make substitutions due to availability of some ingredients.

TYPE: Lager
STYLE: Pilsener (Czech)

Brew Date: 24 March 2007

Ingredients
Whole Grains
10.0L Crystal Malt (3.2 oz.)
10.0L Munich Malt (0.8 oz.)

Malt Extract
Extra Light dry malt extract (2.0 lbs.)
Light dry malt extract (0.4 lbs.)

Hops
Bittering: Saaz pellets 3.3% AA (1.5 oz.)
Flavoring: Saaz pellets (0.4 oz.)
Aroma: Saaz pellets (0.4 oz.)
Dry hop with fermentation: Saaz whole leaf (0.2 oz.)

Yeast
White Labs Pilsner Lager Yeast #WLP800

Procedure
The procedure was very similar to the previous batch, with the following differences in the hopping schedule:
Bittering hops at start of boil
Flavoring hops after 45 minutes
Aroma hops after 57 minutes
Stop boil at 60 minutes
Dry hops thrown into fermenter before closing it up
Screw-ups for this batch...right after the boil started, I turned to clean up some stuff and the pot boiled over. I don't think I lost too much wort, but we'll see. And once again, I pitched more than half of the vial of yeast. I can probably look forward once again to krauesen krud floating on top.

I didn't deviate significantly from the book's recipe, except I was stuck with 10L crystal malt instead of 2.5L. Our local store doesn't carry anything lighter than 10L in crystal malt. The recipe also calls for dry-hopping in the secondary fermenter after 5-7 days of primary fermentation. With this fermenting keg, I only do a single fermentation of 7 to 14 days, and since opening it up in the middle of fermentation invites contamination, I decided to take my chances with dry-hopping at the start. I don't know what effect that might have on fermentation, if any.

Saturday (4/7) I bottled the batch today, and managed to get 12 half-liter bottles out of it before the floating krauesen krud and hop cones got too close to the spigot. Since I had some issues with the last batch (see Clonebrew: Bitburger entry) that I think was related to over-carbonating owing to too much priming sugar, I cut the priming sugar per bottle way back. I only used a bit over half a teaspoon per bottle this time.

Targeting first taste for two weeks from now, 4/21.

A (very) belated update: This batch turned out great. As a result of the boil over, I lost some of the wort, and the end result was an inadvertent Pilsner Urquell Slightly Lite. Of course, I have no idea how much wort I lost, so I can't duplicate it.

I kept one bottle in the fridge for over a year and split it with my old brewing buddy when he was visiting and it was still a great-tasting beer with very nice color and clarity.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

very interesting blog, I enjoyed it alot

Erik sixspeedmanual@hotmail.com said...

Dry hopping in the primary is not recommended, since CO2 gases are escaping for over a week and carry with them a lot of the flavor and aroma you would otherwise get from dry hopping. In the future, try waiting until all fermentation has ceased, then rack into a secondary carboy and adding your dry hops at that time. You will taste and smell the difference. Also, to get a crystal malt less than 10L, you can put about half pound of Pilsner malt on a cookie sheet and bake it at 300F for about 10 minutes. You'll get about 5-8L crystal from that.

Eric said...

Reviving this blog, as I'm about to start doing some brewing again.

Thanks for the advice, Erik!