California Steam Lager

By lianbl88

Taste Notes: Very nice tasting beer from my recipe archives. Smooth, hoppy but well balanced.
Batch Size: 5.00 gal
Original Brewer: Brad Smith
Modifications: Brian & Jere
Boil Size: 2.43 gal
Boil Time: 60 min
Taste Rating(out of 50): 41.0

Ingredients

• 6.00 lb Mallard Malt G - Gold Malt Extract
• 1.00 lb Briess Golden Malt 4.0 Lovibond
• 1.0 oz Northern Brewer Hops
• 1.0 oz Cascade Hops
• 0.5 tsp Irish Moss
• 1-1/2 tsp Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate)
• 1 bottle White Labs American Lager WL840, or 1 Pkgs American Lager Yeast (Wyeast Labs #2035) (room temperature)
• 5 oz of Corn Priming Sugar

Details

Servings 5
Preparation time 90mins
Cooking time 120mins
Adapted from beersmith.com

Preparation

Step 1

Boil 2 gal water with gypsum, then add briess malt, crystal malt and Northern Brewer Hops to pot. Boil for about 60 minutes. Add Cascade hops and Irish Moss during last 10-15 minutes of the boil.

Cool wort to room temperature using either a wort chiller or in ice bath of cold water. Top out fermenter to 5 gallons with pure water, pitch the yeast, stir well, seal fermenter and ferment for 4 days or until active fermentation slows.

I use a 6 gal plastic fermenter for fermentation. Rack / siphon to secondary fermentor (glass carboy) for an additional 5 days of settling. I usually add one package of clear gelatin dissolved into a pint of water at this stage to aid in clearing the beer.

Mix in the priming sugar when transferring to the bottling pail.

Bottle into sterilized bottles.

Original Brewer Notes: I aged this beer for approximately 3 weeks, and it tasted most excellent at that time. Peak flavor was reached after approximately 8 weeks.