Recipes Needed

On purpose?? I thought the whole point of making your own beer was to make beer with flavor, aroma and taste? If you really, really want to make mega swill check your LHBS, they usually have swill kits you can buy.

Just go to your LHBS and tell them you want a kit for American Swill.

Dick

I want recipes not rude opinions. I am not interested in what you think of these beers. So please do not reply in this manner.

Walter

[...]

Oh, you want the room down the hall. It's Getting Hit in the Head lessons here.

On a more serious note, Industrial Lager is a very easy recipe to formulate, but for a relatively inexperienced brewer, harder to pull off. First off, you need temperature control for both the fermentation phase and the lagering phase. Frankly, if those beers are available to you I daresay it'd be cheaper and easier to nip on down to the packie and pick up a case.

The problem is that cloning an exact beer is very difficult. Most of the time you just make a beer in the same category and get as close as you can. Also, the type of beers you have picked are some of the most difficult beers to get right. Many people have low opinions of them, but they are technically some of the hardest beers to brew. Unless you are a very experienced homebrewer, you're probably not going to be happy with the results.

John.

The first question is, are you set up for cold fermentatin and lagering? If not, a recipe will do you no good.

If you have the equipment to brew a lager, you can start with about any light lager recipe you find and get really close to one of these.

---------->Denny

-- Life begins at 60...1.060, that is.

Ahhh hahaha I was waiting for this. I've been toying around with American lager recipes for awhile and can say information on the web is riddled with a poor attitude towards the style and those that drink it. If you had gone through the archives (through groups.google.com for example) you'd find this trend.

... anyways ...

I don't have a recipe that could approximate Molson or Labatt. I never really drank either. However, Tecate is rather close to my heart, so I've been taking nibbles towards that here or there. I can share my experiences in trying to do American lagers. So far, I have done roughly 4 attempts.

General thoughts:

1. 50/50 6-row/adjunct creates a beer too light in body and color. I had done a recipe awhile back that was basically Sprite. I had thrown in the acid malt which gave it a fruity character. With a little haze, I could have made a Belgian Wit with that (and may attempt it yet).
2. Adding an ever-so-slight specialty grain seems to be the way to go. I recommend a 50/50 split with a specialty grain on top of that to give color and some malt character. Granted, 3oz of crystal isn't going to go too far, but it takes an otherwise single-dimension beer and makes it... wider? Claiming that makes it two-dimensional might be too strong. However, it does help cover up what little flaws you have, and even these light beers have that slightest hint of some kind of malt.
3. I have been using the White Labs Czech Budejovice yeast, but recently decided it just wasn't doing what I wanted. On the positive side, their Mexican Pilsener yeast recently became an all-year strand. I haven't finished fermenting the current attempt, but it had a slightly more sulphurous character during fermentation. For a Mexican beer, I find this desireable.
4. I think the adjunct of choice for Bud is rice, but use corn for the rest.

So I know you're aiming for extract, but I don't have much experience doing this style with anything but all grain. If I were to BS something:

For 5 gallons post-boil:

3# Extra-light DME 2# corn sugar (or rice syrup if your adjunct of choice will be rice) 2oz 6-row 2oz Crystal 60L

I gave up on the tap water here for all-grain on these; I cut it with distilled water. I don't know if you need to go that far though. However, my clearest results have come from other water sources. That included my first attempt, which *did* use extract.

Consider a yeast nutrient--follow its directions. It's a lot of sugars without the good stuff yeast need for healthy bones, happy minds, and strong libido.

Steep the grains at 142F (as if it really matters for that quantity, but you want the simple sugars anyways)

Hop an ounce of vintage saaz pellets as a bitter addition (60 minutes) and nothing else. The bittering levels for these beers are very slight so the safe way is to use an aged hop just for preservative effects.

(I found Tradition pellets at ~1/3 each at 60, 20, and 5 gives a hop characteristic like Sapparo, FYI)

Use Irish moss in the last 15 minutes.

Ferment with a very clean, aggressive lagering yeast. You're planning to lager, right? If not, it's just a risk, but just use WLP001 since it's a rather clean (boring?) yeast. Every day in primary, you will want to swirl the yeast around, and monitor the temperature of the fermenting beer often. The rousing makes sure the beer finishes dry, and you definately don't want off-flavors from a warm fermentation here. On the other hand, you don't want it to get too cold or the beer will be too sweet.

Make a starter (get extra extract). Do a diacetyl rest at the end of primary fermentation.

Consider secondary clarifiers like KC Finings. Of all styles, you want this beer to be clear since your drinkers likely expect it.

And for everybody else reading the thread, ignore all that and chuckle: How to make an American lager:

1. Pee in bottle
2. Cap it

There, so I don't have to be the pariah. ;p

I think most of us understood what you wanted to do (it's been asked before). We also understand that unless you're a very experienced brewer you're probably going to fail. That's not a knock against you, but as I said in a previous thread these types of beers are probably the most difficult to get right. The flavors are so light/delicate, that your brewing has to be almost perfect. Any minor flaw in your procedure/technique is going to shine through in the beer as off flavors and imperfections. There's just nowhere for mistakes to hide.

I wish you luck, but I wouldn't have high expectations.

John.

[snip]

Seconded. I've done 4 different iterations of the style. I haven't done 4 batches of a good recipe yet. As far as technique, you have to have lagering down as well as good beer handling. And if you're going all-grain, use double mashing. As for everything else, it is the choice and the nature of the ingredients (including the water).

A bit late but since you only got one actual recipe, here is a clone of Labatt that I came across:

Labatt Blue clone

Ingredients:

0.75 lb Briess Light dried malt extract 3.3 lbs Coopers Light liquid malt extract (late addition) 1 lb 6 oz six-row pale malt 10 oz flaked maize 1 lb corn sugar 4.5 AAUs Hallertau hops (60 min) 1AAUs Hallertau hops (30 min) 0.25 oz Saaz hops (0 min) 1 tsp. Irish moss (15 min) Wyeast 2272 (north american lager) or White Labs WLP800 Pilsner Lager 1 cup corn sugar (for priming)

Place maize and crushed malts in a nylong steeping bag and steep in 3.0 qts of water at 150 F for 45 min. Rince grains with 1.5 qts of water at

170 F. Add water to make 3 gallons. Stir in dried malt extract and bring to a boil.

Add first charge Hallertau hops and boil for 60 min. Add second charge of Hallertau hops with 30 min left in the boil. Add the liquid malt extract, Irish moss, and Saaz hops with 15 min. left in the boil. Remove from heat.

Cool wort to about 50 F and transfer to fermenting vessel. Top up to 5.0 gallons with water, aerate and pitch yeast. Ferment at 50 F until complete (ted days to two weeks), then transfer to a secondary vessel for two to three weeks. Rack into bottles or keg with corn sugar and maintain at fermentation temperature for three to five days. Finally, drop temperature to 35-40 F for two or more weeks.