Time for another wedding beer. This time not for my own wedding, but for two of my friends’ wedding. The groom requested one dark and malty beer (the wedding is in January, so that would fit with the cold weather) and one pale and fresh beer. I’ve noticed that the most popular beers during events, where the majority of the people are not ‘beer nerds’, are balanced and easy-to-drink beers. American Pale Ales with a relatively mild bitterness seem to be especially popular, so I thought I’d go with a remake of my own Wedding APA for the pale and fresh beer. For the dark and malty beer, I decided to go with a dark lager.

I haven’t brewed many dark lagers before, but decided to go for a malt base dominated by Maris Otter and Munich malt. To this I added hints of Chocolate and Dark Crystal malt to give some color and flavor. I kept it simple with the hops, and decided to go with Tettnang at moderate amounts to a fairly low IBU. For the yeast I chose to use W-34/70, which is my favorite homebrew lager yeast because of the ease-of-use (just sprinkled two packs on top of the 21 litres of wort) and the clean and crisp flavor profile. The brewday went extremely smoothly, and 21 liters of wort are now fermenting strongly at 12C. The aroma coming from the airlock is really nice, which is always a positive sign! The wedding is in about three months, which will mean I will have some time to lager the beer once it has finished fermenting.

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