This last year I set out two goals for myself – medaling at NHC and winning the Southeastern Homebrewers Association Brewer of the Year award.  I fully planned out the entire years brew schedule and put in hundreds of hours of work to get there.  Incredibly enough, I was able to pull off both.  I was able to win Gold at NHC for my Schwarzbier (which after checking with me twice they still got the name wrong in Zymurgy…booooo -> It’s name is “Pizza the Hutt” not “Entry 2”) and win Brewer of the Year by a handful of points.
After brewing 2-3 times a month and doing an immense amount of planning and cold-side work I decided to give myself and my family a bit of a break and just focus on NHC this year.  So that means planning enough beers for the first round and entering one other competition to get additional feedback.  For the first round last year, I got 5 entries and I brewed 7 so I could pick the best ones to send.  Since I have a set of beers that I love to drink and do really well in competition I decided to just brew 5 beers this year.  I was a bit surprised to see that I only got 4 entries in Tampa (I requested 5 from all sites within two days shipping from me in North Carolina) but so it goes.  The beers I brewed are Vienna, Schwarzbier, Cal Common, Best Bitter and Hefeweizen.
My plan for the Vienna and Schwarzbier was to brew a low alcohol beer with German Lager WLP830 and then harvest two large pitches from that to repitch into the Vienna and Schwarzbier.  And that (long story short) is how this Helles was born 🙂 . I took the recipe from an old NHC winning recipe and then tweaked it for my 3 Vessel Electric HERMS setup (aka 3V).  Pretty basic and I didn’t bother to gelatin it since it was really just a big yeast starter and not going to be entered in competition.  It turned out to be a really delicious beer that went over really well at my homebrew club meeting.