Making lager at home is a great pursuit if you like lager and think highly of a good brew. Learning to make lager at home permits you to control the tastes in your lager ; you get to decide exactly what the end product is going to taste like. This is astounding if you like going to lager holidays and can discern the differences in flavor between various beers. You’re likely learning to make lager at home because you’re a lager fan who would like to take your drinking experience a step further.
An important component of learning how to make beer at home is learning about your ingredients. Your ingredients supply the taste, color and body of the lager. Poor ingredients will give you poor lager. So don’t feel tempted to stint on your ingredients when making your house brew.
You’ll need malt when you begin to make lager at home ; it is one of the most important ingredients in the process. It supplies the lager with the color, body and flavour. The malt has fermentable sugars in it that will provide the sweetness that is needed; you will balance out the sweetness with hops. Hops are used to provide bitterness and counter the sweetness of the malt. There are various sorts of hops for different tastes, from awfully sour to certain flavours and smells.
The differing types of grains you use when you make lager at home also seriously changes the color and flavour of your lager. It may surprise you that you can use things like oatmeal, rice and corn to flavor your beer. Oatmeal will give the lager a smoother texture while rice and corn will the body and colour of your lager. For a dark and richer lager you may use malted barley that’s brought to elevated temperatures. Use plenty of almost burnt malt barley and you can get a stout.
Yeast is also an important part of beer, without it the brewing process would be impossible. Yeast produces the fizz and buzz of beer, without it you would get a flat liquid that tastes horrible. The type of yeast you buy also influence the beer you produce. A liquid yeast culture will give you interesting flavors but it does not store as long as dry yeast cultures. It also costs more than dry yeast cultures. There are many dry yeast cultures that will help you get the flavor you want, so look around and ask around to get the yeast for the lager you would like.