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It is no secret that Schwarzbier is a bit of a white whale for me (irony duly noted). Dark and smooth with a crisp toasty breadiness, Schwarzbier straddles the line between malty and hoppy while remaining balanced and crushable. Why am I so obsessed? Besides being a noted lagerhead, Schwarzbier satisfies my innate desire as a homebrewer to brew beers that I otherwise would never be able to find “in the wild.” But who am I kidding, really? I love brewing Schwarzbier because it gives me statistically one of the highest chances of advancing to the final round of the National Homebrew Competition 👌. Previous attempts of mine either turned out too roasty, like a porter, or too dry and austere, not even worth a full writeup. But as they say: practice makes perfect and I feel like I am getting really close.
Having been interested in performing my own split batch experiments for a while, my wife graciously gifted me a set of three gallon Better Bottles as well as a set of 2.5 gallon ball lock kegs so I could split my typical 5.5 gallon batches. I figured why not kill two birds with one stone? This Schwarzbier is the first of what I hope will be a great many split batch experiments of varying levels of scientific significance.
I challenge you to find a topic more contentious than haze in beer. Minus the odd, typically wheat-based style, the general mandate for clarity is the clearer the better–crystal is best. Well, for one reason or another our friends over in New England have decided to buck the trend: instead of crisp, dry, crystal clear megadank hop bombs the New Englanders have opted to follow a whatever-it-takes mentality to squeeze maximum “juiciness” out of their hops and yeast. As the result of their methods, the beers have a distinct haze/turbidity to them (“
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