good for you koelsch-eh [General]

2007 Jun 30
Here's a beer I brewed a few weeks ago at my Brew 'n' Q. What a great day it was! Perfect weather. Lots of great beer. Making great beer. And lots of friends!

I call it Good For You Koelsch-Eh. It's of the style of beer brewed in Koeln (Cologne) Germany - Koelsch. But that's a Geschutzte Herkunftsbezeichnung (appellation controllee) so I always recommend that homebrewers outside of Koeln should call theirs "Koelsch-Style" or simply "Koelschy". But on Canada Day about 3 or 4 years ago I was brewing a very similar recipe to this one when I coined the term "Koelsch-eh" for Koelsch-style beer brewed in Canada. And it's called "Good For You" because it has a bag of Good For You Muesli in the mash :-)

This particular batch made for a long day because I ended up doing a double decoction mash just for the heck of it. I decided to try doing a 130F Protein rest with the Weyermann Pils malt to break down the higher-order proteins into something that would in the glass create a far more attractive head. Then I decocted it on up through the various saccharification rests to break the starches down into yummy sugars for the yeast. So the main mash spent about 25-30 minutes at 130F and about the same at 147F before I finally jacked it up to 153F with the final decoction. Then rest 90 minutes there. In hindsight I should have let it rest 10 minutes before pulling the decoction, but you live, you learn.

Grain Bill
10 kg Weyermann Pil
625g Good For You Muesli (the one with just grains, no fruit or anything)

Hop Bill
6.1% German Tettnanger used throughout
70g @ 60 min
50g @ 20 min
30g @ 0 min

I'm estimating about 30 IBU bitterness

Pitched 2 fermenters with DCL/Fermentis K97 and S189 yeast respectively.

I'm just enjoying a glass of it now, after it's been kegged about 9 or 10 days and in the fridge about a week. This is definitely shaping up to be one of my very best Koelsch-ehs. The head is already just as I designed it! Nice, even foam that sits a good half cm for the first few minutes, and as it falls in still maintains the characteristic Koelsch-lace almost to the bottom of the glass. Though the carb still has a bit to go - hopefully will be just about right by this time tomorrow for the Canada Day BBQ

At this point it's still very cloudy so it's a Koelner Wiess, which is a 2nd style of beer unique to Koeln. It's basically a Koelsch that is served very young and unfiltered vs Koelsch which is lagered for 4 to 6 weeks at near freezing temps then filtered. My current one is damned fine one if i do say so myself!

The photo included in this post is a picture of a Koelner Wiess I took on a beer trip there in July/Aug 2000.