Brewing Tips for Vienna Lager

Vienna Lager is a style that you don’t see too often on the store shelves. Many Vienna lager-like beers are brewed in Mexico these days, believe it or not. Much of the time it’s difficult to tell if the examples you can buy are fresh or not and how much adjuncts the commercial brewers are using. Of course, these factors are some of the main ones that play into why we home brew beer. If you haven’t gotten into brewing lagers yet, the Vienna Lager style is a good reason to start.

John has brewed Viennas a couple times and had some competition success. In this video, we run down some of the techniques he’s used to brew an excellent version of the style. While an amber colored lager might not seem like a great summer beer, Vienna has a couple characteristics that should change your mind. Slightly caramel-y and bread like, Vienna Lager pairs extremely well with grilled foods. Its pleasant noble hop character also works well with this pairing. Being a lager with a crisp finish, it’s very quaffable and perfect for drinking in session with groups of friends.

The first tip may seem obvious, but a great Vienna Lager starts with Vienna Malt. Vienna Malt is a slightly toned down version of Munich. Munich seems to get all the attention as a complement to drive maltiness in other styles. Vienna malt sort of gets overlooked due to its milder malty, bready, and caramel notes. However, that milder quality serves well to be a larger part of the base malt grist for this beer. Balance with some Pilsner malt and you have a great base to start playing with some caramel malts, roasted malts, or other base malts to drive some color and complexity.

The second tip is to go with a great lager yeast. John prefers straight up White Labs German Lager yeast WLP830. As with any lager, using a mighty pitch of healthy yeast is key. More importantly is to really brew several lagers with one lager strain and get used to how it performs. For Vienna Lager focus on treating the yeast right to drive attenuation as much as you can. A large pitch of yeast, nutrient, and plenty of O2 before the ferment and WLP830 will make a clean and crisp, but still malty and complex, Vienna Lager.

Last tip comes down to color and post fermentation fixes. Sometimes it is tough to get the right color in Vienna Lager without having specialty malts taking over and being too powerful in the taste. A simple fix for this is to experiment with the specialty grains you like until the flavor is right, then you can darken the beer with a little Sinamar from Weyermann. Sinamar is a dark malt based extract that can be used to darken the beer. The best way to apply it would be at packaging. Evaluate how much darker you want the beer to be and start adding and blending in the Sinamar a half ounce at a time. Do this until the beer hits a color you are happy with. I tend to love that dark orange almost true amber color.

There you have it. Thinking about Vienna Lager always makes me thirsty and long for a big liter of good cold lager!

BREW ON!