Brewing up another batch

I haven't actually brewed the batch yet, but probably tomorrow I'll be doing my first batch in a long time. I bought the ingredients for an amber lager and another Ruination IPA clone.

When I started looking into making a lager again on the homebrewtalk forums, I found that I made one major mistake the first time. When I pitched the yeast, I did it at room temperature. While this is sometimes OK with a lager, and is done by a lot of homebrewers, it produced a lot of banana ester that way. This time I'm going to cold pitch the yeast, meaning down at the lager fermentation temperature of about 50F or so. In order to do this though I found out that one needs to make a large starter, much bigger than the usual pint plus 1/2 cup of extract. This one calls for 3 quarts. What it really is doing is propagating the yeast so you have enough cells to get the fermentation started immediately. The smaller starter won't have enough and it would take a long time to get it going. Cold pitching is the German way of doing it, AnheuserBusch uses beechwood and that makes it less important, or something like that. Beechwood aging is real I guess, not just an advertising slogan, and really part of the brew process.

So tomorrow I'll brew it up, and then let it cool overnight in the carboy, then pitch the yeast in the morning. At least this means I don't have to worry about it cooling fast. Leaving it without yeast though means there is a greater chance of contamination. The other option is to cool it all down to 50 in the pot using lots of ice. The tap water is already cold enough.