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The plan for my brown porter that I wanted to brew today was to pitch it on top of the yeast cake from the ESB I brewed a few weeks ago. The ESB has been done with its fermentation for a few days now, so it was time to finally get it into a keg and start the carbonation process. I took the opportunity to keg that beer today while also brewing the brown porter.
I posted a preliminary recipe for the brown porter last week, but that wound up being modified before I actually brewed it. The updated recipe is as follows:
Brown Porter
-7.00 lbs British 2-row
-1.00 lbs Brown Malt***
-0.50 lbs Crystal 120L
-0.25 lbs Roasted Barley
-0.75 oz Challenger Pellets (7%AA) 60 minutes
-0.25 oz Challenger Pellets (7%AA) 15 minutes
-Wyeast 1098 British Ale Yeast from the yeast cake in the ESB
The porter was mashed at 152F with a water/grain ratio of 1.25 qt/lb for one hour. There was a problem when I went to start sparging the mash: some grain apparently made its way under the false bottom in the mash tun and clogged it. I couldn't really do anything about this, so I went to the basement and retrieved the rectangular mash tun that I use for my ten gallon batches which uses a bazooka screen instead. The mash was dumped into this tun and sparged. I really did not want to use this mash tun because more wort gets left inside it because of deadspace under the valve. Sometimes you just have no choice.
As the wort was being chilled with my immersion chiller I racked the ESB into a keg and got it setup inside my chest freezer. The ESB came out to ~4.8% ABV and tastes delicious. Once that was all set, I was able to get the porter transferred into the fermenter that the ESB had been in. It was then that I realized that I had over half a gallon of wort more than I had planned on. This led to the gravity of the porter being 1.033 instead of the 1.043 that I had planned on. That irritates me, but it won't be a deal breaker on this one. We'll just have to see how it turns out.
*** The 'brown malt' listed as an ingredient is actually a pound of British 2-row malt that was toasted in my oven at 350F. 0.4lb was toasted for 10 minutes, 0.3lb for 20 minutes, and 0.3lb for 35 minutes. This should be an interesting experiment.
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5 comments:
no pics? awwwww
Nice save! I think it should turn out alright. I'll have to try toasting my own.
I'll start getting pictures posted of some of my brewdays and whatnot sometime. I just haven't been motivated to yet. I fully intend to do a photoblog of the next time I do a 10 gallon all-grain batch outside with the propane burner. Of course, it needs to not be 5 degrees outside with a sheet of ice on the concrete behind the building....
And yeah, that whole mash situation was really panic-inducing for a minute. It's a good thing I had that other mash tun laying around.
Toasting your own grains is really interesting and a fun way to experiment with brewing.
Hi DarkNova,
I see you take in interest in brewing your own beers. How did you become interested in homebrewing?
I started getting into good beer, I had a few friends that liked to homebrew at the time, and I had access to free equipment from my dad's lab at Cornell. My parents got me a homebrewing book for Christmas, and that sealed the deal.
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