Your Father’s Mustache Preprohibition Lager

Jeff Renner, a founding member of the Ann Arbor Brewers Guild, began a successful campaign in the 1990s to get Classic American Pilsner recognized as a style in homebrewing competitions. In 2015, the new BJCP Style Guidelines recategorized it as a Historic Beer and a Pre-prohibition Lager. Renner first brewed “Your Father’s Mustache” when he began his own investigation into what is now called pre-prohibition lager. We’ve scaled it for a 5-gallon (19-liter) batch.

Batch size: Brewhouse efficiency: OG: FG: IBUS: ABV:

5 gallons

1.050 (12.5° P) 1.010 (2.5° P) 35 5.2%

(19

liters) 80%

MALT/GRAIN BILL 8 lb (3.6 kg) 6-row malt 2.25 lb (1.02 kg) flaked corn, separately mashed with a portion of the malt and boiled in a cereal mash, then added to main mash (see “Directions,” below)

HOPS SCHEDULE 1 oz (28 g) Mt. Hood [5% AA] at first wort (12 IBU) 0.75 oz (21 g) Cluster [7% AA] at 60 minutes (20 IBU) 0.5 oz (14 g) Mt. Hood [5% AA] at 10 minutes (3 IBU)

YEAST Any lager yeast will do. Renner prefers White Labs WLP833 German Bock, originally from the Ayinger Brewery in Germany.

MASH DIRECTIONS Schedule for 95-minute American Double Mash (times listed in countdown format) In a separate pot, mash in the the malt to hit 153°F (67°C). Mash in the main mash 104°F (40°C). Bring the cereal mash to a boil. Cereal mash boiling. Add boiling water and/or a burner with recirculation to ramp up the main mash to 144–146°F (62–63°C). Add the cereal mash to the main mash and adjust temperature as needed to 158°F (70°C). Ramp the temperature to 170°F (76°C). Mash out, maintaining the wort temperature at 170°F

95 minutes:

one-third

80 minutes: 75 minutes: 65 minutes: 60 minutes:

of

30 minutes: 0 minutes:

are flaked corn and (76°C).

FERMENTATION Ferment at 48–50°F (9–10°C) for about ten days until fermentation slows, then rack to a keg and drop the temperature to 32°F (0°C). “When I do it right, the remaining malt sugars perfectly carbonate the beer in the keg,” Renner says. He lagers for six weeks. attended the May events. “To taste this right now as a re-creation is a kind of fascinating thing,” he said. “This [1883] is when things started to get kind of good. Before that, you never quite knew [about the taste or quality of the beer]. This was the start knowing things, which as a brewer, I find really interesting.”

The view from inside the process was as intriguing. “It was more than an escape from day-to-day work,” Lund says. “Before this was done, we could not know what the beer was like. The number one thing I learned was beers at that time were actually pretty good, if you could follow good manufacturing practices and get good raw materials.”

The American Connection

of

Brewers in America, most of them German immigrants, began to brew with lager yeast as early as 1840 and likely had access to pure strains not long after 1883. Robert Wahl, founder of Wahl-henius Institute of Brewing Technology, studied pure culture yeast propagation under Emil Christian Hansen’s direct tutelage. Returning to the United States in 1886, Wahl set up a pure yeast culture system and service to provide American brewers with “pure pedigree” yeast cultures. Some of those cultures were certainly the same ones used to brew in Denmark, and they became the varieties that would eventually dominate in the United States.

Advances in the field of yeast genetics have reframed the way strains are understood and changed the way they are classified. Not long ago, Jürgen Wendland, Carlsberg’s former yeast biologist who was not involved in The Re-brew Project, wrote that “genome sequencing of lager yeasts is only at its early beginnings.”

Nonetheless, many brewing texts are already out of date when it comes to lager yeast taxonomy. Keeping it simple, lager (Saccharomyces pastorianus) strains are currently sorted into two groups: Saaz and Frohberg. Saaz includes the Carlsberg strain (S. carlsbergensis) that Hansen first isolated. Frohberg includes Weihenstephan WS 34/70.

However, before sequencing revealed the genomic differences between these strains, chromosome fingerprinting established two basic types of fingerprints in U.S. yeast strains. Greg Casey began researching chromosome fingerprinting as a post-doctoral researcher at the Carlsberg Research Laboratory in the 1980s. Before retiring in 2013, he used the process in research while working for Anheuser-busch, Stroh Brewery, and Coors (as well as the brewing partnerships of which Coors became a part).

His studies identified two families of industrial strains, called Carlsberg and Tuborg because the purified cultures traced back to those respective breweries. There were variations within the family, but after World War II only two large breweries in the United States were using Tuborg-type yeast—anheuser-busch and Coors, both of which thrived as the population of American breweries shrank.

The list of shuttered breweries that used Carlsberg yeast is familiar to those who collect Breweriana and includes Schaefer, Blatz, Falstaff, Hamms, Heileman, Lemp, Lucky Lager, Olympia, Schlitz, and many others.

Casey’s system of classification does not align perfectly with the Saaz/froberg model, but what’s relevant is how the strains so prevalent in the United States compare. Among other things, beers fermented with Tuborg yeast attenuated better, had a higher ratio of esters to alcohol, produced a “cleaner” ester, and had less sulfur. Casey concluded that the strain was much better suited for light lagers.

Because he works on process optimization in the pilot brewery at Carlsberg, Lund knows both the Carlsberg and Tuborg strains