Just trying to brew for my time first ever. Thought i would try a a light one. Bud Light Clone. I picked up all the ingredients but the brew instructions does not tell me when to add the 1lb dextrose. Sounds like a lot for the bottling carbonation???
Help, brewing instruction unclear for beginner
- Thread starter brewey
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It would help if you uploaded or shared the recipe for us to look at but pale lagers such as Bud and Bud light typically use corn to up the gravity and increase the alcohol while keeping the color and body light. I currently have flaked corn in my pantry for a cream ale I'm doing in January or February. Seems like your recipe is skipping mashing any corn and just adding straight corn sugar. Should work fine. I'd just treat it as you would DME, add it at any point after the mash (if all grain) and before the boil
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You picked one of the most difficult beers to brew! The dextrose should go into the beer to ferment. Don't use that much sugar to prime your beer!
Yeah for sure difficult, the big question if you're attempting a lager is what do you have for temp control for fermentation and conditioning? Lagers ferment cool (like 45-55F) and then lager/condition cold. Personally the only control I currently have is a basement with an ambient temperature in the mid 60s so I primarily only do ales with fermentation ranges from the mid 60s to 70s. I know there are a couple lager yeasts that can do ok at ale tempatures and some guys will just try to make a "lager" with a clean fermenting ale yeast like S-05 but if you really want to nail the style you probably need to be able to control the fermentation tempature. For a first brew (if I had it to do over) I'd probably try a SMaSH (single malt single hop) blonde ale or pale ale. Then once you got that style down and still want something resembling a pale lager but don't have temp control I'd check out doing a Cream Ale. I tried biting off more than I could chew with a Hefeweizen on my first brew (even though the guys here warned me) and I made a good beer but it in almost no way resembled a Hefeweizen. I think it's better to hit a home run on an easy style than eek out a single chasing after a tougher one. Just my 2 cents though
