Today it was time to brew the third batch of beer for my wedding in August (see my previous posts for the Wedding Pils and Wedding Blond): an American Pale Ale-like beer, fermented with one of my newly created A62×C902 lager yeast hybrids. I’m not really sure what to expect from the beer, but I’m hoping for a really fruity aroma and flavour. Apart from the large amount of experimental fermentations we’ve done with the yeast hybrids at work, we have also fermented a bigger batch of ‘typical’ lager wort with one of the hybrids, which we then kegged and taste-tested. That beer at least had a really fruity flavour, with plenty of ethyl esters and isoamyl acetate. That wort was relatively lightly hopped, so it will be really interesting to see how the yeast aromas go along with a more heavily hopped beer. I’m hoping for bold flavours, yet still an easy-to-drink beer.

The recipe might seem a bit complicated, as it features six different malts and five hop varieties. This is because I’m using up some opened malt and hop bags. I’m hoping that the ingredients come together nicely, and that the flavours aren’t too muddled in the final beer. The malt bill consists mainly of some Pilsner and Maris Otter malt as base, with a hefty portion of Munich malt to lend some more breadiness. The rest of the malt bill consists of some CaraPils, oat flakes and Crystal 6oL, in order to give the beer some increased mouthfeel and a hint of caramel. I aimed for an original gravity of around 1.050, in order to get a beer with around 5% ABV. For the hops, I chose to bitter with some leftover Styrian Goldings and Simcoe, and at flameout I added a mixture of Amarillo, Citra, Saphir and Simcoe. I aimed to keep the bitterness levels quite low and instead concentrate on a massive hop flavor and aroma. I pitched a 2.5L starter of one of my lager yeast hybrids after I had cooled the wort down to around 17C. I kegged the Pilsner yesterday (it was tasting awesome by the way!), so my fermentation fridge was free again. I set the fermentation temperature to 15C, and 6 hours after pitching there was already slight activity in the airlock. Fingers crossed that this turns into an awesome beer!

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