439: Ben Howe of Otherlands Manipulates pH and Process in Pursuit of the Perfect Franconian-Style Lager

Ben Howe’s brewing career reads more like that of a chef than a typical brewer—stints in Denmark, brewing jobs on both the East and West coasts, weeks spent interning at breweries that intrigued him—but one fateful visit to the Zehender brewery in Monchsambach opened his eyes to Franconian lager and inspired a nearly decade-long quest to understand the beer and its mechanisms of flavor. More recently at Otherlands, he’s pushed boundaries of accepted brewing dogma, mashing with pH levels far past any sensible range in an effort to build color and flavor—and the things that shouldn’t work still obviously do work.

In this episode, Howe discusses both his traditional methods and modern concessions, including:

• learning from Will Meyers and Megan Parisi at Cambridge Brewing
• capturing Franconian-ness in long-boiled lager beers
• old-style vs. new-style German lager brewing
• kräusening to carbonate rather than spunding before terminal
• never raising the temperature for a diacetyl rest while using ALDC to control precursors
• finding color with only pilsner malt
• hardening water for lager brewing with calcium carbonate, magnesium carbonate, and gypsum
• mashing above 5.8 pH
• maintaining atmospheric pressure for yeast during fermentation
• boiling large amounts of low-alpha hops for a long time to build flavor and texture

And more.

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