My first ever all-grain beer was a pre-prohibition pilsner. Due to nostalgia, i've always been interested in brewing another one. What's a pre-prohibition beer, you might ask? Well, it's a lot like a normal, no-frills beer, but made exclusively with 6 row malt, a bit of corn, and cluster hops. We used lager yeast and fermented it cool, because we brewed it mid-winter and figured that it would have been fermented cool, "back in they day." And we went the extra mile by collecting spring water from the top of a mountain (literally) because we figured that'd make the recipe even more "old timey." This beer was really fun to brew and it tastes great too.
The mountains the water for this beer came from
Brew Day Video
FYI: Full recipe details are below
Pre-Prohibition Lager Recipe
Water Volume
This is where our water came from, a natural spring on the side of a mountain
- Beginning water volume: 7.86 gallons (29.8 liters)
Adding spring water to our kettle
Chemistry adjusted with lactic acid to reduce pH to 5.3. Note, we don't generally adjust the pH of our tap water but we brewed this with spring water and needed a bit of help.
Malts
- Pale Malt (6 row) - 8lbs. 4oz. (3kg 742.1g) (83.8%)
- Flaked Corn - 1lb. 1.5oz (496.1g) (11.1%)
- Cara-Pils - 8oz. (226.8g) (5.1%)
Note: The cara-pils is definitely not old timey, but we added it to create a bit of foam and head retention. You know, to make the beer look a bit prettier.
We finely crushed all of our malts in a mill before mashing
Mashing
- 122F (50C) for 20 minutes - protein rest (to reduce haze in final beer)
- 150F (65.5C) for 60 minutes - saccharification (convert starch to sugar)
Mashing in
Boil & Boil Additions, Etc.
After the mash, we heated to boil temp and boiled for 60 minutes.
Our wort had a nice golden color to it while boiling
Here are the additions
- 60 minutes (start of boil) - 1.3oz. (36.9 grams) Cluster Hops
Our first hop addition
- 10 minutes - 0.5oz. (14.2 grams) cluster hops
Cooling & Hopstand / Whirlpool Additions, Etc.
None for this beer.
Fermentation
At the end of the boil we cooled the beer down and added 1 package of Pilsen Lager Yeast (Wyeast Labs #2007).
Pitching yeast
Yeast floating in wort
We fermented at 53F (11.7C) for two weeks. We then bumped the temperature up to 70F (21.1C) for about 10 days to complete a diacetyl rest. The D-Rest should have only taken two days, but for some reason ours took much longer. We smelled and visually inspected the beer, letting it rest until all traces of diacetyl were gone and yeast activity (bubbling) had ceased.
Our beer in a fermenter just after the brew day
Dry Hops
None to speak of for this beer.
Benchmarks
- Starting gravity - 1.042
- Volume into the fermenter - 5.4 gallons (20.4 liters)
- Final Gravity - 1.010
- ABV - 4.20%
Tasting Notes / Rating
This one is a winner for sure. We think that the modern take on lagers is better (they're more crisp and less "grainy.") But this beer is great for what it is. It's actually been pretty popular with the friends who stop by our office to help drain the taps!
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