About 2 years ago, Martin Keen decided to take “The Homebrew Challenge” and brew 99 beers in 99 weeks. This recipe for a New Zealand Pilsner is his 99th beer, the last one! We thought this was such a cool project, that we decided to invite Martin over to our office for a celebratory brew day. Follow along with the recipe below to brew this beer at home and make sure to check out our brew day video & Martin’s brew day video for some extra info.

Full Brew Day Video

This is a recipe for a 5-gallon batch and it is tailored for our 10 gallon 240 volt brewing system. Watch us use it in the video below.

Benchmarks

• SG: 1.048
• FG: 1.008
• ABV: 5.25%

Ingredients Needed

Grains

• 8 lbs German Pilsner (2 Row)
• 1 lb Carapils
• 8 oz. White Wheat Malt

Hops

• 1 oz Pacific Jade
• 1 oz Motueka
• 1 oz Nelson Sauvin

Yeast

• German Lager (White Labs #WLP830)

Brew Day Instructions

Water

Fill your kettle with 8 gallons of water. Add in a campden tablet to remove chlorine. We did the following water chemistry adjustments.

• 2 grams Calcium Chloride
• 1.5 grams of Epsom
• 1.2 grams of Gypsum

Mash

Crush your grain (we recommend double crushing for maximum efficiency) and heat your water to 148F. This recipe calls for a 60 minute mash.

Hops

Once your mash is done, pull your grains, hook them above your kettle, and let them drain. While you’re waiting for your grains to drain, set your controller to 100% power to start a boil. This recipe calls for a 30 minute boil with a 20 minute whirlpool addition at 180F. The hop schedule is as follows

• 30 minutes - .4 oz of Pacific Jade
• 5 minutes - .6 oz of Pacific Jade
• Whirlpool - 1 oz of Nelson Sauvin
• Whirlpool - 1 oz of Motueka

Yeast and Fermentation

After a 30 minute boil and 20 minute whirlpool, chill your wort to 68F, transfer to a fermenter, and pitch one pack of German Lager Yeast from White Labs. We fermented this under pressure for 3 weeks, however you may want to let it ride for 4 weeks. To learn more about pressure fermenting, subscribe to our YouTube channel and be on the lookout for an upcoming article. We’re doing a video about this very soon.

Tasting

This beer turned out great! Before tasting it, we got a nice fruity aroma from the beer. Once we sipped it, It tasted pretty dry and clean, as a lager should taste. We did perceive some white wine and tropical characteristics, which were most likely from our hops. If we were to change anything about this recipe, we might dry hop it, but even without dry hopping we got plenty of hop aroma and flavor. If you brewed this recipe, let us know how it turned out and don’t forget to check out Martin’s channel.