Homemade Dark Lager Beer - Easy and Tasty (no Special Tools Needed)

So, why to make own beer ?

Because it is really easy (although time consuming) and it will allow You to create really tasty beer (better, believe me, much better than You can buy in a shops) which suit Your needs. Really, You can play with ingredients as You want. You like light beers - make one, You like darker ones - no problem, add darker malts, maybe You like more bitterness in taste - no problem, add more bitter hops to Your brewing liquid.

To make a beer You need just 3 things:

1. malt
2. yeasts
3. hop

That's all. It is for a base beer. We however will make a dark lager beer which i like the most. Not very bitter, with hop falvour and of course dark.

I'm using following ingredients:

• 15-17l of water
• 2kg Pilsner Malt - as a base for the beer
• 2kg Munich Malt - for a lager, darker beer. More sweeter malt than Pilzner
• 400 g carmel Malt - for taste and colour
• 100 g chocolate Malt (Carrafa) - for colour and a taste of bread (a little like bread)
• 30g bitter hop (Marynka) - for bitterness. A little bitterness.
• 30 g flavour hop (Lubelski) - for fresh, hop falvour.

If You can not by this special kind of malts You can replace them with following:

• for taste and falvour (aromatic): Lubelski (or Golding or First Gold)
• for bitternes: Marynka (or Challenger or Target)

As for a yeast, I recommend to use liquid ones. They are more expensive, but a lot of better.

We are making lager which needs a little bit longer mashing (adding malts and activating them). More over we will make the more complicated mashing which will give better final results (more deep taste). So we will:

• rise the temperature to 54 degrees (Celsius), add malts and keep in this temperature for 15 minutes
• rise the temperature up to 60 degrees for 40-50 minutes
• rise once again to 72-74 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

Important thing: Don't cross the 74 degrees. Of course nothing bad happend if You will get 78 or something like that, but 80 and higher can have negative impact in the beer taste. Moreover, You can burn Your beer in higher temperatures.

After adding malts You need to cool down the beer and filtrate it to get rid of malts. You can use dedicated tools for that, but as You can see on the attached video, the typical kitchen equipment is really enough for that job.

So filtrate the beer and hm.. watch out, because this process could be a little bit messy ;-)

After filtration You will have liquid with the sweet taste and deep dark color. Very tasty, You can try it even.

Now it's time for adding hops.

Because we are making dark lager, we need to boil the beer for about 80 minutes (lighter beers don't rwquire such long boiling). We will be adding the two types of hops during boilng:

1. after 50 minutes of boiling add the 30g of hop for bitterness (Marynka or it's replacement)
2. just 10 minutes before the end of boiling add the hop for falvour (Lubelski or it's replacements)

Now it's time to cool down the beer once again.

Warning: from now on, the beer needs to be treated with clean tools and containers or it will be spoiled very badly with the bacteries

After cooling to 20 degrees pour the clarified liquid to the big container. Add the yeasts (different yeasts have different preparation process which is written in the instruction on yeasts) and seal with the fermentation pipe.

Now wait for 2 weeks. After that period pour the bear from the old/dead yeasts to another container and once again wait 2 weeks for refermentation and Your beer will be ready for consumption :)

almost ready in fact becouse it won't have any co2 (gas). So pour the beer to the bottles and add to them, before closing, a little bit of sugar (less than a half of the spoon for 0,5l of bootle) and wait for 2-3 days. Now You will have delicious dark lager with gas. This kind of beer can be stored for 1-3 months and will have better taste in time.

Warning: don't add to much of sugar and close the bottles because You will end with dangerous granade-bottles which really can explode from the CO2 pressure.