Brewing Pale Lager 

by Wendy Aaronson

I prepared a short presentation about pale lagers in January

1. Now is the best time to brew lagers because it’s cold outside!  The water temperature outside is cold enough to easily drop the wort temperature to 60F.  If you can shut off the heat by simply closing the air vent in your fermentation room and opening or shutting a window to drop the temperature to 50F-52F, you don’t even need a refrigerator or temperature controlled fermenter.  Bill and I use this low tech method and it works. 
2. The pale lager styles are very similar.  The link below goes to a spreadsheet of the BJCP categories/subcategories that qualify for the Pale Lager competition.  All information is from the 2021 BJCP style guidelines.
   

Pale Lager specs.xlsx

 Note that pale lagers are not complicated.  You can see in the column of characteristic ingredients that most of these beers only contain pilsner malt.  Notable differences are:

•  The Czech lagers are made with soft water.  To make 3-4 gallons of soft water for the mash, use distilled water and add ¼ teaspoon of Calcium Chloride per 3 gallons.  For the sparge water, filter your water and either allow the water to sit overnight to eliminate chlorine and chloramine or crush ½ of a Campden tablet into it.  We also add a teaspoon of phosphoric acid to the sparge.

• American lagers include some adjunct grains.

 3.      The brewing process and fermentation schedule are essentially the same across the styles.  The first link below goes to a spreadsheet containing a basic recipe for each of the styles.  The second link goes to a table of hop substitutions for these styles.  As I mentioned most of the beers only contain pilsner malt.  However, some of these recipes include specialty malts that give the beer more body and improve the mouthfeel because the recipes only have a single temperature infusion mash instead of a traditional decoction mash.  We also use a couple of ounces of acidulated malt to lower the pH of the mash.  Ideally, you want a mash pH of around 5.2-5.4.  Dark colored malts naturally lower the pH.  A few ounces of acidulated malt helps to lower the pH without adding color to the beer. 

 Pale Lager Recipes.xlsx

Hop substitutions.xlsx

No excuses.  Everyone loves a pale lager.  Go forth and brew!