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  • Writer's pictureAndrew Gouin

My First Beer - Vienna Lager, or thereabouts

Vienna lager, among my favourite styles of beer, only this wouldn't be it. I'd read a lot of information on how to make beer and how different variables (temp, water quality, etc...) can make the beer taste different. Now there is a lot of information out there, really good information at that. I read through so much of that information, and apparently didn't retain much of it at the time.


There's some really wonderful tools out there for making beer, my tool of choice has been Brewer's Friend. Brewer's Friend is low cost, constantly updated, works like a charm, and for the average brewer, free for up to 5 recipes. Now, I really think this is where I got hooked, the science and math side of it. There is just so much science and math to brewing, but not the kind you need a degree for (which is good because I don't have one!), but rather the kind you need a love for.


After finding Brewer's Friend, I decided to design my own recipe, this is where I got stupid. Flashes of being a world renowned brewer going through my head and beers made of pure awesomeness being made left, right, and center. The software may make it easy, but it's up to you to keep it easy, especially when you are a first timer, this is not something I'm known for. So one of my issues is I'm scatterbrained, I have to keep things exciting in order to stay on track, and I just couldn't see an extract beer being exciting for me, so I chose the all-grain route, yup, for my first beer, which also happened to be a Vienna lager.


So off to my local homebrew shop I decide to go, and I went to pick up my grain bill and yeast and hops. The guy at the store even thought it was a bit ambitious but nonetheless nothing would stop me from gaining world notoriety as a famous brewer, I was doing this.


I started the mash off ok, so I thought, I used only spring water, lowered the ph, apparently not enough as I would later learn, and then let it rest, everything seemed fine, just great in fact. Now after you're done mashing, you need to get that wort into your kettle, well didn't that just take forever now. I watched time and again on Youtube how people would do this and get it flowing just right in no time. This would be easy, again with the freakin' world notoriety. Two hours later I found myself still trying to get the wort out of the cooler, I just could not get it to come out cleanly, but then, why would it? Then I come to find out apparently I hadn't had enough water to start with in the mash, yay, of course didn't think I could maybe just add some to the wort pre-boil, I thought that would lower the alcohol content from what I was looking for, and didn't think to maybe check the pre-boil gravity, oh, wait, I didn't even have a hydrometer, that's right, I was too stupid to remember to get a simple hydrometer! So I had no idea what my alcohol was going to be with this brew, I just thought for sure it was going to be the best thing out there.


Finally, the boil. I didn't lose much on the boil, thankfully, because I really didn't put enough water in to the mash to account for the grain itself, and even though it's actually put in front of you with the software, sometimes a guy just doesn't want to read that stuff, ya know? Add the hops, hopefully this works, still thinking I can pull off greatness here. Finish the boil, now I have to cool it, forgot about that part during planning. How do I get my wort cooled? So I messed around and messed around and finally got it cooled down enough to pitch the yeast.


Now, to wait, watch the fermentation, see it happening, getting impatient, and finally it's finished. Here's the day, I get to bottle it, ah crap, that means it's going to be a few weeks to try my brew. Ok, so I bottle it, and wait. And wait. And wait some more. So now three days have passed, and I'm really beginning to lose my patience, so I get an idea in my head. I have all this beer just waiting to be tasted, and it just doesn't want to wait that long to be tasted, it wants to be drank now. Oh, and I have a Sodastream. Now let me say something here, these things work awesome for beer in a hurry, you just really need to be careful about your carbonation.


So off go a couple tops, fill a SodaStream bottle and carbonate it. Now for the taste test, how did I do? Remember how I said thankfully I didn't lose a lot of water on the boil? Yeah, well, I didn't realize just how high the gravity was in this beer. I still don't know to this day what the alcohol was but it wasn't 5%. I'd put it more around 7.5%, why you might ask? It didn't take much to get wobbly. How did it taste though? Not like a Vienna lager. Let's start with the bitterness, this was on the level of an IPA for bitterness, and that didn't get rounded out with malty goodness either. I couldn't say what that beer was, but a Vienna lager, it wasn't. Now did I like it? Yes, I don't care how it tasted it was my own creation, and I loved it, and it really grew on me too, would I make it again? Probably. The beer was good, and I was hooked, even if my aspirations of global brewmaster notoriety were quashed.


Even a bad beer can still be good, because something good always comes from it, learn from your mistakes, pick yourself up and try again. After this, I went on to a really yummy Chocolate Orange Stout, then an Irish Red Ale, then a New England IPA, and so on. I just get more and more ambitious too.


Oh, and at some point in there, I even opened a homebrew supply store, but that's a whole other story.

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