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Brew Dudes Vienna Review

April 7, 2016 by Derek Springer 5 Comments

I have been a fan of the Brew Dudes blog, one of the longest running homebrew blogs around, for just about as long as I have been homebrewing. Needless to say, I was stoked when fellow Vienna enthusiast John from Brew Dudes reached out to me on Twitter and asked if I was interested in exchanging Viennas with him for a new Homebrew Swap segment they were doing–I did not realize I was going to be the first! Exciting!

As for my impression of John’s Vienna: it has a great soft bready/toasty malt profile and is very nicely balanced with a moderate bittering with a light floral hop character. Color and clarity is spot on and it is overall a very clean and soft Vienna; very well made indeed! 🍻

I told him I hoped he entered it in a few comps, I predict it will do very well. Hopefully he entered it in NHC too, maybe we will have a showdown in the final round 😉

Read their full post here.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Brew Dudes, review, vienna

Geburtstagsparty – “Traditional” Vienna

February 16, 2016 by Derek Springer 29 Comments

Check out the rest of my recipes in the index.

geburtstagsparty wide

Anton Dreher has a posse.

Anton Dreher has a posse.

If you have spent even a little time reading my blog you know I am a big fan of Vienna Lager. Something about it strikes all right right chords for me: crisp, clean, full-flavored, well balanced between malt and hops, and just uncommon enough that I feel motivated to brew it consistently. Also, if you consume as much Mexican food as I do you know there are few beers that are as appropriate as a Vienna Lager to pair with a burrito. 🙂 My enthusiasm is infectious enough that now even my Internet buddies Marshall & Ray, Dan, Brian, and a few others have all jumped aboard the Vienna-train for NHC this year. I like to think I am doing my part to keep this style from getting dragged into the historical category.

The last time I wrote about Vienna Lager (Fiesta Cumpleaños) I came at it from the angle of a Mexican interpretation of the style, which tends to be a bit darker and with a lightly sweet/caramelly character. After publishing the article I got into correspondence with Andreas over at Daft Eejit Brewing (who has a great series on Vienna Lager) who convinced me to try brewing a more “traditional” version, consisting of mostly Vienna malt and just enough roasted malt for color. Well, I am convinced: I have brewed this “traditional” version a few times now and have been very pleased with how it turned out. I can hardly even think of things I would want to tweak with this recipe besides making more of it!

Read on for the recipe and some thoughts on making great Vienna lagers.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Recipes Tagged With: lager, recipe, vienna

Fiesta Cumpleaños – Vienna Lager

March 16, 2015 by Derek Springer 17 Comments

Fiesta Cumpleaños wide

Check out the rest of my recipes in the index.

Anton Dreher

Anton Dreher

I have a curious attraction to Vienna Lagers, a style that all but disappeared off the face of the earth, save for a handful of breweries in Mexico. If you do not know the story, it goes a little something like this: in the early/mid 1800’s a fellow from Vienna by the name of Anton Dreher formalized the process we know today as lager brewing with a beer he called Märtzen. At the time the “pale” malts were significantly darker than they are today and produced a beer that was a coppery reddish-brown with a significant amount of toasty melanoidin character. Flash-forward to the late 1800’s and an Austrian immigrant to Mexico by the name of Santiago Graf (whom little is known, unfortunately) opened a brewery using the traditions he brought from home, with the addition of a small percentage of roasted malt to compensate for the alkaline water of the region. Thus, as Vienna-style lagers began to disappear in their homeland (favoring pale Pilsner style lagers), the style lived on in a handful of breweries in Mexico.

My own interest in Vienna Lagers is due to San Diego’s proximity to Mexico: we are too far from Europe to easily get any interesting European imports, so in the bad old days before craft beer took over there was only bland macro lagers or a handful of Mexican imports to choose from. If you were lucky, a restaurant or supermarket would have Negra Modelo available; a fine beer and just about the perfect pairing for Mexican food. To this day, if I go somewhere that has Negra Modelo on draught I will likely choose it 80% of the time. Now that San Diego is a craft beer mecca it has gotten harder and harder to find any Vienna-style lagers (or lagers in general), so I have decided to take matters into my own hands.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Recipes Tagged With: lager, recipe, vienna

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Derek Springer

Derek Springer

I write code & brew beer--if you ask nice I'll share some with you :)

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