Description

Čmelák Tmavý – Czech Dark Lager All Grain Recipe Kit with Lance Blackman

The third instalment from our community themed “Brew With You” series, where we visit home brewers and brew some amazing beers, designed by them! We teamed up with the mighty Lance Blackman AKA Doorstep Brewing for this single decocted, Czech Dark Lager. Lance is massive fan of Czech beer, having spent much time in the Czech Republic both traveling and learning about the beer culture in this wonderful country, oh and hunting out trains. This suited us perfectly given our shared love for these beer styles and our previous projects with Budvar and Radim Zvanovec, the Global Brand Ambassador for Budvar.

The beer itself is jam packed of malt flavour, but as it’s a lager it’s still quaffable and really refreshing. The slight floral notes brought from the Saaz hops adds a lighter note to the malt character but the real star here is the darker malts used to bring that deeper brown bread and toast notes derived from the blend of malt Lance selected, which we then also decocted.

Lance chose to brew this darker version of a Czech Lager as a way to feature the recent addition to our malt line up from Weyermann, their Bohemian Dark Malt! A malt with intense malt aroma,  toffee and dark caramel notes; full body and pronounced malt sweetness. This is then teamed up with some more incredible malts to complete the recipe along with Saaz hops for a traditional hop presence, then fermented using Wyeast 2278 Czech Pils. A traditional yeast strain for these beer styles, with a dry finish allowing the opportunity for the malt to really shine through.

We did a single decoction on this recipe, allowing us to build on the skills learnt from previous projects such as the last instalment in this series with Radim where we brewed a single decocted Czech Lager. The method we went for here was to dough in the full grain bill at around 55c and hold for 15mins before drawing off around 1/3rd of the mash, trying to get a thicker portion and heating this to 63c, holding for 10-20mins to allow for some conversion of the starch in the decoction before bringing to a boil, avoiding any scorching. After boiling for around 20mins we then added this back to the main body of the mash, which raises the whole mash temp to around 63c. Hold this for a further 30-40mins before raising to mash out temperatures of 70c for another 20mins.

We brewed this beer on Lance’s mega 70L Three Vessel System, which he has housed in his purpose built brewing space, The Waiting Room, which is in a converted outbuilding in his garden. This system was a sight to behold and to brew on, with lots of customisation and thought gone into the whole set up. Lance has been brewing for many years and has built this system to suite his style of brewing, to make this kit available for you all, we’ve scaled this down to a 23L version, meaning you can brew this on popular single vessel systems or on a smaller BIAB system.

We hope you have as much fun brewing this beer as we did when we visited Lance at his home in Huddersfield, if you want to see us in action on brewday then head over to our YouTube channel and check out the video where we got hands on with his brewing system and cooked up this wonderful beer!

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Ingredients Included

Weyermann Carafa Special Type 3
Simpsons Malt – Roasted Barley
Weyermann CaraMunich Type 2
Weyermann CaraBohemian Malt
Weyermann® Bohemian Dark Malt
Weyermann Floor Malted Bohemian Pilsner Malt
Saazer – BarthHaas® Pure Hop Pellet (60 grams)
Wyeast 2278 CZECH PILS. BB: 14/09/2024 (1 pack)

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Method

Beer Style (main): European Lagers
Beer Style (sub): European-Style Dark Lager
Batch Size: 23
Original Gravity: 1.047
Final Gravity: 1.012
ABV %: 4.6
IBU: 25
Mash efficiency: 80
Brewing equipment:

THE MASH
Temperature °C (Step 1): 50
Length (mins) (Step 1): 15
Temperature °C (Step 2): 63
Length (mins) (Step 2): 30
Temperature °C (Step 3): 70
Length (mins) (Step 3): 30

THE BOIL
Boil time (mins): 90

Hop / kettle additions and timing:

27g Saaz – First Wort Hop Addition
16g Saaz @ 45min
17g Saaz @ 15min

Yeast: Wyeast 2278 – 1 Packet – Built up to an appropriate starter size.
Fermentation temperature/steps: Pitch at 6c then let free rise to 10c. Following this hold at 10c for a total of 10-14 days before packaging and conditioning.