PM Amber Bière de Garde - Steam Lager Style

[mashani]

In the mood for these, so I made one. I would have used some Munich and less pilsner extract normally but LHBS was out of Munich, so I went with Aromatic.

2.5 gallon batch, 75 minute partial mash at 147-149 with a late extract addition:

Mash:

1# Vienna
1/3# Aromatic Malt
1/4# Carafoam
1/4# Special B (mine is 120L)

1oz Saaz and 1/2oz Sterling @60 (my hops are old, this is going to give me 20somthing IBUs, not 40 like it sounds)... use about 22-24 IBUs worth of hops if you do this.

Late additions:

2.5# Pilsner LME @10 (fresh stuff from MoreBeer)
0.5# of turbinado sugar @10

WLP810 as the yeast. Any lager yeast that you can ferment in the 60s and not be nasty will work. A Kölsch or German Ale yeast works here too.

Turbinado is to add some character and keep it drier for the OG since I'm using some extract.

OG was 1.062

[philm00x]

Bookmarking this, particularly because I plan to do something similar by using steam beer yeast for a bock beer and hope it turns out as good as this sounds.

[swenocha]

I am digging my steam beer that had 17% munich, 8% 40L, 4% Victory and 1% chocolate. I'm liking your grain sched here. I used N. Brewer in mine, but I may have liked your hops better. WLP810 worked great for me here as well... I brewed it in January, but didn't like it until the fall. It's great now, but I burned through some of it too early, so it's pretty much gone...

[mashani]

Except for one bottle at a month or so just for "perspective", I'll probably ignore this for 3-4 months after I bottle it. The last one of these I did blended wonderfully around that point and stayed really nice for a year+. Probably a lot longer but I drank it LOL.

I've never put chocolate in a steam beer (as in California Common). I usually use 60L instead of 40L in those, just because I like it better. I like Northern Brewer in them, and usually I'll throw some in later in the boil to get some more flavor out of them.

But that sort of late addition doesn't really belong in this kind of beer, it's more about the malt... so if anything just a tiny bit. For a beer like this any noble hop or noble-like hop would work fine. Those French farmers just used whatever they could scrounge up.

"Steam Lager Style" like this is actually pretty authentic for a Bière de Garde. Lots of people think they need a Belgian strain. You can use one, and it's good - and I do that sometimes - but this way is good too and lets the malt shine a bit more.

[mashani]

I bottled this, it finished at ~1.014. The sample tasted good.