Right now my pale ale is fermenting away in the cooler that I usually reserve for kegs. Having no full kegs, it seems to me that the time is ripe for fermenting. Once that beer is ready, I want to brew another, but to ferment it, I need a cool space. The solution, naturally, is to ferment the beer in the cooler with the ale that I'm serving: ale serving temperatures are lager fermenting temperatures. I haven't decided yet what the lager will be.

It's motherfuckinghothere. The two thoughts that naturally come to mind are california common ale and a pilsner. The pils would be pretty oridnary: noble hops to bitter, dry hopped during the last week of conditioning, pils malt (9lbs) and carapils (1/2 lb). I might do something with this to emulate decoction effects, but I won't do a proper decoction. No, this would be SIMRed with a brief protein rest and then a 30-30 conversion at 145 and 155. One option for decoction effect is just to replace a small portion of the pils malt with munich. That will boost malt character and be easy as hell. Another thing that I'd considered is taking half a gallon of the first runnings and boiling it for 15-20 minutes--until it was significantly reduced, and, presumably, darkened. I might try that.

But I might not even make a pilsner. The California Common would make a nice summer beer, right? The recipe would probably be maris otter (around 9 pounds) and 6 oz. each 80L and 40L crystal. I might use some american 2-row malt in place of the maris otter. I might also do something weird, like add flaked barley. Domestic Northern Brewer hops, only to about 20-25 IBU, with a flavor addition at thirty minutes and then a small addition of bittering hops just to get the desired IBU level.