Your Mother's Mustache

Since it's still frickin' cold in my basement, I decided to brew another lager today, a classic American Pilsner. This was the style of beer that most American breweries brewed before prohibition. It was a slightly stronger, maltier, and hoppier version of the current premium American lagers. Mine is a variation on "Your Father's Mustache" from John Palmer's "How to Brew", using rice instead of corn. I've had a 20lb bag of rice sitting around, just waiting for a beer to be made with it. The original recipe was from Jeff Renner. So here's my take on the recipe for 11 gallons:

Your Mother's Mustache
5lbs 6-row barley
10lbs 2-row
5lbs rice
1.15 oz Galena 13.1%AA hops
1oz Williamette 4.8% AA hops
Munich lager yeast


I did a cereal mash of the rice with 1 lb of the 6-row, basically cooking it to gelatinize the starches so they could be converted to sugar in the main mash. I should mention that I used 4 gallons of reverse-osmosis water to dilute the 4.25 gallons of tap water. I also added 4 grams of gypsum and 4 grams of CaCl to bring the mash pH down. Check your own water profile before you make any adjustments.


The mash was multi-step:

122F Protein rest 30 minutes
144F Beta rest 20 minutes
158F Alpha rest 40 minutes


I came in a little low on my protein rest (120F) and the Beta rest (141F), and I didn't want to add more hot water to bring it up, because I knew my mash tun would be completely full after the addition of the cereal mash to bring it up to the alpha rest. I compensated on the alpha rest by adding the cereal mash at a hotter temperature (185F vs 175F). Also, the alpha rest was more like 50 minutes because I forgot to heat the sparge water right away. I fell asleep at the wheel, but in my defense, I'm not used to doing cereal mashes, so I had already heated water twice, once for the main mash, and once for the cereal mash. That is all I normally do, once for an infusion mash, and once for the sparge. By the time I realized I needed to heat sparge water, I was a half hour into the alpha rest.

The hopping schedule was:

1.15 oz Galena 60 minutes
0.5 oz Williamette 10 minutes
0.5 oz Williamette 0 minutes (added at flameout)

My pre-boil gravity was 1.048 for 13 gallons, giving an efficiency of 85%, a lot higher than normal. I'm guessing this is because of the multi-step mash, plus the fact that I had a high water-to-grain ratio for the final step. Post-boil original gravity was 1.054, right in the middle of the range for this style.

I used the 3rd runnings (I batch sparged) for a separate brew, a cream ale. I added dry malt extract to the boil of that to get it up to a decent gravity. I'll post that recipe tomorrow.