Contrafact Homebrew: 34B - Mixed-Style Beer

Style: 34B - Mixed-Style Beer - India Pale Lager

For Oktoberfest this year I'm doing a nearly full keezer of German beers. I wanted to have something with excessive hops akin to an American IPA, yet still have it fit in somewhat with the German beer theme. Enter the India Pale Lager: it's got German malts, yeast, and hops, plus a big dry hopping with Galaxy. It fits somewhere between a Helles Bock and American IPA. There is no dedicated BJCP style for IPL, so I'm putting it in 34B - Mixed Style: Bock + IPA.

Full recipe is on BrewersFriend but here's the TL;DR:

Brewday: 2018-8-5
Malts: Bohemian Pils, Munich Light (20%)
Hops: [Magnum] (Hallertau Blanc) {Galaxy}
Yeast: W34/70 (Weihenstephaner)
OG: 1.062; FG 1.009; ABV 7%
Kegged: 2018-8-22

Floor Manager Steve supervising the milling. This is post meltdown (I think I made up some new swear words) due to not being able to get the mill to, you know, mill. I thought I would make a minor adjustment to the bottom roller to increase efficiency. Turns out that was a Huge Mistake. I could not get the damn thing to mill AT ALL. Nothing would catch, just like the BarleyCrusher before it, the MonsterMill was starting to look like an oversized paperweight.

After tinkering for a while I at least got it to crush grains albeit not as fine as I would like. And once again my efficiency suffered. Ended up at 63%. Down from 65, and 67, and 70. How I long for the days when I used to get 80% efficiency. Oh well. At least the beer turns out good in the end unless I screwed something else up.

Efficiency continues to be my bane.

Mash temp

(A) Brewday beer: The Helles is clearing up nicely. Still has a few weeks to go and I try to limit my 'sampling' to 250ml max while keg lagering.

Mash complete

120g, 5g/L Hallertau Blanc hops to be added at 5 min.

Brewing Assistant/Floor Manager Steve is on the job

chilling

OG is always low isn't it? One of these days it will surprise me.
Expected 65%, got 63. This adjusted to 1.062.

And away we... go?
This was really slow to start and I am confused as to why. I racked the chilled wort onto an active W34/70 yeast cake from the Märzen. 15 hours later it was just barely bubbling...

2018-8-6, 18:00 - fermentation is full on. Took a while to wake up the yeasties I guess, but it's going great now.

2018-8-15 - ~240g Galaxy dry hops

2018-8-17, 2 days after dry-hopping and it looks (smells and tastes!) like a NEIPA. Hard to believe this will drop out clear eventually. Gravity check was... difficult. There's so much stuff in suspension the line on the refractometer was too blurry to be of any use. But my best guess is it dried up to about 1.008 or 9 and finished at 7% ABV. I'll get a better reading at keg time.