Follow-up: Taste-testing Short- and Full-Lagered Pilsner
A bit more than three months ago, I wrote about a little-discussed (but routinely-practiced) method of producing lagers without long conditioning times. To refresh, here’s co-founder and brewer Alan Taylor on Zoiglhaus Brewing’s standard lagering technique:
“We knocked out at 11.6 Plato at 47 F with around 1 million cells per Plato per ml, let the beer start cranking (it usually takes a good 24 hours to get going well). At around 7 Plato (91 hours in) we let it start free rising to a maximum of 66 F, bung the tank at around 2.5 to 3.0 Plato (163 hours in), letting it naturally carbonate as much as possible. Then we wait until the beer repeats gravity and is diacetyl/acetaldehyde-free. The tank was over 64 F for 6 days before it was chilled to 32 F at 281 hours (12 days). So overall a pretty typical fermentation schedule for a 24-barrel batch size.”
I also mentioned in that post that Alan was brewing a batch of pilsner with a more classic lagering period for comparison purposes. This week, he, assistant brewer Sam Guss, and I sat down and triangle-tested that beer against two batches of Zoiglhaus’ regular pilsner to see how much the extra lagering time factored into the flavor profiles.
A triangle test is a clever way to see how distinguishable two very similar beers. You blind taste two beers poured into three samples and see if you can correctly distinguish them. In this case, Alan gave us three flights and didn’t tell us what we’d be tasting. There were two different batches of the standard pilsner and one batch of five-week beer (process: ten days fermentation, the rest conditioning time).
In flight one, it was the five-week and one two week, flight two the two two-week beers, and flight three the five-week and the other two-week. Put another way: (1) 5 and 2a, (2) 2a and 2b, and (3) 5 and 2b. Alan also made sure we weren’t all given the same combinations—so I got one of the five-week beers in my first flight, but Alan and/or Sam got two. Finally, in addition to trying to distinguish the beers, Alan asked us to identify a favorite if we had one.
I was both excited and anxious to participate in this little experiment. I’ve never done triangle tests before (exciting!), but I’ve never had the best palate in the world (scary!). It turned out to be about as difficult as I expected—the beers were very similar. Nevertheless of the nine flights of beer on the table, we managed to successfully distinguish the two beers on eight of the flights, including in the case of all six of the head-to-heads on the 5 vs 2-week beers.*
But here’s the interesting thing. We were all over the map on which ones we liked the most. I preferred the five-week beer in the first flight best, but the two-week beer in the third flight—and I really didn’t have any preference in the second flight. (And again, they were extremely similar beers, so the preferences were light as a feather.) By memory, Alan also liked a five-week and a two-week in different flights.
The upshot is that the beers were only very slightly different. Given the value of tank space at Zoiglhaus, there is certainly no reason to tie it up for another three weeks per batch of beer. These are the kinds of experiments breweries routinely run on their beer, and they have to balance many factors. After the results, Sam posed the million-dollar question (paraphrasing):“How much difference would the beers needed to have been to justify the expense of lagering them nearly a month longer?” In this case it was rhetorical—the beers were nearly identical—but it isn’t always.
As a final coda to this case study, it’s important to mention than I remain agnostic about the “best” way to make a lager. When I visited Pilsner Urquell in 2016, I got to try young beer that had been conditioning a week or two. It was atrocious. It was full of weird esters and a massive load of sulfur. So the process and ingredients, particularly the kind of yeast a brewery uses, is always going to factor into these decisions.
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* To protect the innocent, I won’t say who missed one of the flights, but I also can’t pass up the opportunity to brag my ass off: I got all three right, which may be my greatest achievement in a tasting. Obviously, to protect my perfect record, I can never do another triangle test.