What Will Happen If...

[At. Ailbhe's Brewery]

... I brew a lager kit with ale yeast?

I want to brew a lager but I don't think I can/will bother getting the low temperature right. So, if I toss in the ale yeast which suits me a lot better, what'll happen?

Will I spawn a spiderbaby, or what?

Any of ye done it?

[guidomax]

It'll be fine. In fact, most lager kits already come with ale yeast, for precisely that reason - homebrewers can in general find it hard to attain the low temperatures required for lager yeast to do its stuff.

The taste will be somewhat less 'clean' or 'crisp' with an ale yeast. In general ale yeasts are designed/bred/whatever(!) to impart more 'fruity' flavours and give the nice rounded flavour profile that you get with an ale, which could be undesirable if you're after a clean-tasting lager.

That said, it'll be perfectly drinkable and you'll not have a problem with it.

Don't know whereabouts in the country you are but if you have a garage/shed etc, then I'd go with the lager yeast as the weather at the moment is absolutely conducive to using a lager yeast (as long as it doesn't freeze, which it won't at these temps). Lager yeast takes a couple of weeks to ferment out but the recent kit lager I did with an additional lager yeast (Coopers Aussie Lager with a packet of S-23) turned out really nice, so probably worth it.

[At. Ailbhe's Brewery]

Super Guido, thanks very much for that. I'll brew one of them for the summer so, see how we go!

I'm "across the water" in Eye-Ur-Land and lately it's been Baltic stuff, -12 some nights which did for some of my bottle stock that had been outside in barrels of water. A load burst.

I had to move the stuff I was conditioning out of the shed and into the cool porch at home; buckets of water were freezing so I didn't want to take any chances with my Wherry.

I'm thinking of an Ozzie lager, Cooper's maybe, but I was very impressed with Woodford's so they might get the gig aswell.

Any suggestions?

[Barm]

yes - as said: using an ale yeast will certainly produce an alcoholic beverage of sorts - but don't expect it to taste anything like lager.... Back in the dim & distant, I did a Young's "lager" kit that came with an ale yeast. Really it tasted more like a light ale - just about drinkable, but completely lacked the dry, crisp lager character. Which is the whole point of lager.

[thedeckking]

I've done a Coopers Aussie and it uses an ale yeast and came out really well. One of the tastiest lagers I've done

[sparky Paul]

As Barm says, some of the Lager kits taste nothing like lager.

However, the Cooper's kits can be made into a very passable imitation of a commercial lager with a moderate amount of tweaking... it has been discussed before at great length, so I would have a search in the kit section for some ideas. Here's one of my old efforts to start you off...

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=22949&p=258376

...and I've just noticed a spelling mistake in the thread linked to, which I've now corrected.

[Barm]

yup - good post is that. TBH 'tweaking' in such ways as this easily becomes the norm after you do it once and realise what a huge difference it makes...I haven't followed a kit's 'proper' instructions for years now!

I've just got a coopers euro going using pretty much this method; this kit does come with a 'real' lager yeast. This time around though, I've not boiled the dissolved-up extract; Coopers recommend not boiling it since, according to them, this drives off any remaining hop oils from the extract, and also darkens the brew. Instead I boiled up/steeped the hops (Saaz) in water, and added to the FV through a muslin strainer. We'll see what difference it makes; for the moment it's nicely chugging along at a fairly chilly 12degC - may the cold weather persist for another couple of weeks to let it finish!

[sparky Paul]

This time around though, I've not boiled the dissolved-up extract; Coopers recommend not boiling it since, according to them, this drives off any remaining hop oils from the extract, and also darkens the brew. Instead I boiled up/steeped the hops (Saaz) in water, and added to the FV through a muslin strainer. We'll see what difference it makes;

Boiling wort will drive off hop aroma, but I only ever boil a very small amount of the extract, i.e. the rinsings from the can after you've dumped the bulk of the extract into the fermenter. It's more for convenience than anything, and I doubt it has much effect to the overall brew.

What you do need to bear in mind is that you need to boil the hops in a worty solution, rather than just water, to get the best extraction. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it does make a difference. You could of course boil the hops in water with some of the spraymalt added, which would have exactly the same effect.

[At. Ailbhe's Brewery]

Lovely stuff lads, thanks.

[EoinMag]

What you do need to bear in mind is that you need to boil the hops in a worty solution, rather than just water, to get the best extraction. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it does make a difference. You could of course boil the hops in water with some of the spraymalt added, which would have exactly the same effect.

No you don't, it's the other way around, you get better extraction from pure water than you do from wort, reason is probably to do with the saturation levels of the solution. But any of the brewing softwares now have the option to add extract after boil, or even the half and half extract additions. Adding extract after boil seriously decreases the amount of hops that you add to the boil, so it's much more efficient.
Check your sources again, or look for articles on late extract addition.

[sparky Paul]

What you do need to bear in mind is that you need to boil the hops in a worty solution, rather than just water, to get the best extraction. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it does make a difference. You could of course boil the hops in water with some of the spraymalt added, which would have exactly the same effect.

No you don't, it's the other way around, you get better extraction from pure water than you do from wort, reason is probably to do with the saturation levels of the solution. But any of the brewing softwares now have the option to add extract after boil, or even the half and half extract additions. Adding extract after boil seriously decreases the amount of hops that you add to the boil, so it's much more efficient.
Check your sources again, or look for articles on late extract addition.

Sorry, I can see how my post reads, and that's not quite what I meant... my apologies. I didn't specifically mean the amount of extraction, but the quality of the extracted flavours.


Anyway, as you requested, I have checked my sources and looked back in previous forum discussions regarding this...

Is it really necessary to boil the extract when boiling the hops or specialty grains? I was under the impression that the extract suffered if reboiled and had planned to boil smaller amounts of water with the other ingredients which would then be added to the rest of the water with the malt extract for fermentation.

Yes, as Steve said you need to boil it to sterilise it, drive off DMS and to precipitate proteins. In theory, you shouldn't really boil malts OR hops in water alone as the PH is not acidic enough and you may extract unwanted compounds (tannins generally) - the extract produces a slightly acidic environment where this doesn't happen.

This is the first relevant quote I came across, I hope mysterio doesn't mind me quoting him.


Boiling hops in pure water has some undesirable effects on the flavours extracted. When boiling hops in wort, the sugars act as a ph buffer, suppressing the extraction of undesirable tannins which occurs at levels of lower acidity. As I say, I'm no expert on this, but this has been discussed before on here several times by people far more knowledgable by myself, and this is my limited understanding of the reasoning behind it.

As far as I can see, general concensus is that you need to boil the hops in a worty solution to avoid risking astringency resulting from extraction of tannins and other unwanted compounds.

[EoinMag]

I think the late extract addition thing has been done to death and the consensus is that it's perfectly acceptable to do, no point in derailing a thread in any case.

[mickhew]

Try not to avoid using lager yeasts if you can, as they're not that difficult to use, if you have a garage or shed. I've just done a Coopers European Lager, in the garage, covered the FV with a duvet. The yeast fermented well, and the kit is the best I've done so far, straight to number 2 in my top ten, just under Coopers Stout. I did a Cerveza with a supplied ale yeast, and wasn't that impressed.

[sparky Paul]

I think the late extract addition thing has been done to death and the consensus is that it's perfectly acceptable to do, no point in derailing a thread in any case.

I don't think there's any problem with adding additional extract post boil, so long as there are some sugars in the boil.

However, that's not what I was getting at... this thread was about kit brewing, and the point in question was whether to simply boil the hops in water before adding the resulting liquor to the wort. I've always understood that it's not a good idea, for the reasons given above. Lots of kit brewers do steep hops in water, like making a hop tea, but this doesn't seem to give any problems, I guess due to the lower temperatures involved.