I love to drink this style of beer and i would like to brew my first Mexican Vienna. I am still deciding which recipe to follow, i have the BCS recipe and the recipe from Modern Homebrew Recipes. Any advice or recipe for this style of beer? Thanks!
Are you thinking like a Modelo Negra? I like that beer on occassion.
Use the White Labs-Mexican Lager yeast. Good stuff.
I have a number of recipes for this and I really like this style as well. Using 940 is a good call and I will also use 2124. My Bordertown Dark Lager recipe (the link to my site is somewhere over there <----) comes close and one key is the German Carafa III which gives color and flavor without being overly roasty. Light additions of noble hops and even flaked corn is acceptable. I even have a Mexican Beer page on my site (which desperately needs updating but I don’t have time!!!). Cheers.
I have been using Chis Colby’s recipe from BYO for years now as a base for a departure point, I would suggest using it.
The style of these beers starts to get a little fuzzy sometimes. I remember when Negra Modelo was referred to as a “Mexican Vienna” but check out THIS VIDEO (you have to enter your birthdate and click to play the video) where Rick Bayless refers to it as a Munich Dunkel. I just made my first real Munich Dunkel (not Mexican Dunkel) and if I were to convert it to a Mexican I would go easier on the Carafa and possibly add corn and then use 2124 or 940 instead of the 2308 I used for the German version. That vid I linked to is awesome… makes me want to drink Negra Modelo! Cheers.
My recipe for a Negra Modelo inspired Vienna is at the bottom of this page. And Denny liked it.
Thanks for the recipes guys, now i want to brew all of them and decide which one is the keeper
First i will use Mexican Lager to be more traditional, about the water profile i will use the Vienna Boiled profile from Bru’n Water, is this profile correct?
Yeah. Negra Modelo and Noche Buena are the only mexican macros that i like!.
Martin usually suggests a color profile rather than a locale, so i would suggest Amber Full/malty?
I have relatively modest water numbers and add some CaCl and CaSO4 and try to make it so it’s ‘balanced’ but favoring chloride just a little bit. I find that if I have much more chloride than sulfate in an already-malty recipe, it gets too malty and I would like some crispness in there. Good luck on this beer and let us know how it comes out. There are some good examples of this style like Victoria, Indio, Leon, Negra Modelo, Bohemia Oscura, etc. and I make beers that are similar to these styles almost every time I have a lager yeast up and running. Cheers.