Craft Beer & Brewing Course
Brewing Traditional Lagers with Dovetail
From design to decoction to coolship to cellar, Dovetail owners and master brewers Hagen Dost and Bill Wesselink dig into the details of how they produce their acclaimed lager, Kölsch, and weissbier.
4 chapters · 17 lessons · 50m
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Your instructor
Hagen Dost & Bill Wesselink
Co-owners and master brewers, Dovetail Brewery
Dovetail, founded in 2016, specializes in two things: lager and spontaneous fermentation. The lagers are traditional, heavily influenced by the rustic beers of Upper Franconia, the region around Bamberg, Germany. Dovetail’s stable includes their Helles, their kellerbier-esque Lager, their Vienna, and their Rauchbier. All of those get a traditional decoction mash, all of those pass through the coolship, and all of those go to open fermentors for primary before several weeks of lagering.
Course contents
4 chapters, 17 lessons, 50m of video
Chapter 1
Welcome
- Welcome, and About Dovetail6:32
- Our Breakout Brewer Profile on Dovetail
Chapter 2
Materials + Technique
- Water + Mashing4:55
- Why Decoction Matters
- Raw Materials7:19
- Traditional Hefeweizen: Worth the Trouble?
- Processes and Techniques:15:08
- Gearing Up to Brew Lager
Chapter 3
Fermentation + Lagering
- Crashing, Fermentation, and Maturations11:06
- Get Sideways: Lager Brewers Turn to Horizontal Tanks
- Temperature Control Tips for Lagering at Home
- Packaging + Serving3:16
Chapter 4
Conclusion, Recipes & Further Reading/Listening
- Final Thoughts1:51
- Recipe: Dovetail Helles
- Recipe: Dovetail Czech Dark Lager
- Bonus Reading: When Brewers "Know a Guy," Kriek Can Happen (2018)
- Coolships & Decoctions: Exploring Franconia, the Most Brewery-Rich Region in the World
What students say
Lots of great information and history in one course.
This course helped me to think outside the box on how to achieve a decoction mash on the 10bbl ABE system I work on, which is definitely not designed with decoction in mind. Cool!
As someone wanting to learn to brew lagers this was amazing. Worth the entire subscription if I get nothing else! Thanks so much Dovetail and B & B!