Haus Lagerbier Update

In the very first post on Fuggled this year, I wrote about my main homebrew project for 2025, namely to take my many, many years of lager drinking, my fewer years of experience brewing my own beers, and come up with a beer that would be my "house" lager. I have named it, somewhat unimaginatively I am sure, Haus Lagerbier.

The aim is to have something I brew 4 times a year, on the first Saturday of each quarter, to compliment in many ways my house best bitter, a brewday that I could probably do in my sleep. For this year, I wanted to dial in my preferred yeast strain before messing with hops and malt, etc. As such, batch 1 was brewing using the near ubiquitous 34/70, while batch 2 switched to S-189, which is a strain from Switzerland.

Batch 1 went on tap in March, and looked like this in the late winter sun...

I was most remiss with Batch 1 in that I didn't take the time to sit down and really analyse it with my modified Cyclops set up. A fact likely due to the fact that it tasted good and between Mrs V, myself, and some of the neighbours, we cranked through the keg in double quick time.

Thank goodness for it being a year long project, and so a couple of weeks after kicking batch 1, I brewed batch 2, exactly the same beer but with the different yeast. One thing I noticed about S-189 as opposed to 34/70 was that it took an extra couple of weeks for the green appley thing of youth to fade out of the beer. Those early pints looked like this.

However, I got my shit together and sat down one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago to write some notes, with the beer pouring absolutely beautifully and looking like this.

On to the notes then:

• Sight - yellow to light gold, good couple of inches of white, rocky, foam, fantastic clarity (not fined with anything), and good head retention.
• Smell - Lightly toasted malt, some crackeriness, floral hops, kind of like walking through a mountain meadow on a breezy day.
• Taste - nicely bready, with slight toasted edges, nice hop spiciness, think cinnamon in particular
• Sweet - 2/5
• Bitter - 2.5/5

Damn it I am happy with that beer. The mouthfeel and body were just what I wanted, medium bodied and such easy drinking. The bitterness hits right at the back of the mouth, leaving me wanting more, and invariably more is what I had. I was genuinely sad when the keg kicked last weekend.

Now though, I find myself on the horns of a dilemma for batch 3 as I would happily stop and just make batch 2 the default for Haus Lagerbier. Yet, there are plenty of other bottom fermenting yeast strains out there that might be even better than S-189...what to do, what to do?