Cerveza Piñata - Mexican Lager - BrewZilla Brew Day

 

Here's a quick run down from our latest brew day - our Cerveza Piñata Mexican Lager. We had a friend join us for this one, so we didn't capture as many photos as we normally would.

Starting out in the usual fashion by collecting our strike and sparge water into our BrewZilla and Digiboil vessels.

22L strike water volume for the BrewZilla

Next up, some water chemistry adjustments to our mash and sparge water - we used the "Balanced" profile with equal amounts of chloride and sulfate.

We also measured out and added approx 3.75mL of phosphoric acid to the mash strike water

Our pre-milled grain bag from 41 Pints of Beer - 4.8kg of grain in total comprising of Gladfield American Ale Malt, Pilsner Malt, Malted Maize, Vienna and Munich malts.

We mashed in, stirred the grain thoroughly using our drill mash paddle/mixer attachment, then left the grain bed to settle for 10 minutes before taking our first pH reading. It came in at a surprisingly low 5.07 which didn't seem right to us.

So we recirculated the wort for a minute or two, then took another sample which gave us a much more expected value of 5.44

We recirculated for 60 minutes at 65°C and had slow but reasonable flow back through the grain bed - perhaps a little slower than normal because of the inclusion of malted maize which can thicken things up a bit

At the conclusion of the 60 minute mash, we raised the grain bed temperature to 75°C for our 10 minute mash out, then sparged to get our pre-boil volume of 28L

We took a gravity reading at this point which gave us a reading of 1.042 - spot on with the recipe. Our digital refractometer had been reading low so we suspected the actual value may have been a bit higher, but with this as a minimum value we were in good shape.

We opted for a typical 60 minute boil which we prefer to do for basic lagers like this one. Anecdotally, we feel we get too many vegetal flavours from the larger dose of hops required for bittering with noble hops using a 30 minute boil, plus we didn't have to worry about a whirlpool hop addition like we do with most of our ales so the total time doesn't work out too different.

At the conclusion of the boil we chilled the wort down for 20 minutes and took a floating hydrometer reading which gave us 1.046 - 1 point lower than the recipe predicted which is fine, but also suggests the pre-boil reading we had on our digital refractometer was indeed quite accurate.

We chilled the wort in our fermentation fridge overnight before pitching the single packet of Mangrove Jack's M84 Bohemian Lager yeast. We haven't used this yeast before so we're very curious to see how it turns out.

Fermentation was quite slow to get going but eventually ramped up and hit terminal gravity (1.010) after around 5-6 days.

We fermented between 14°C and 15°C which is the upper range of the recommended temperature for this yeast, but also above the minimum fermentation temperature suggested by Mangrove Jack's when pitching a single packet of this yeast.

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