Sunday, February 8, 2009

Brew Day: Chocolate-Coffee Porter

Today was brew day for my porter. I wanted to reuse the yeast cake from the previous Brown Porter, so I figured that some sort of porter or stout would be a good idea. The yeast cake is Wyeast #1098 British Ale Yeast. It does a pretty good job, leaving a bit of sweetness behind. The decision was made to brew a chocolate stout like I've done a couple times in the past, but leaving the door open for adding coffee as well.

The decision was made this afternoon to make it a chocolate-coffee porter.

Chocolate-Coffee Porter

Ingredients:
Malt
-2.00 lbs X-Light DME
-7.00 lbs British 2-row
-2.00 lbs Flaked Oats
-0.50 lbs Crystal 60L
-0.50 lbs Crystal 120L
-0.50 lbs Chocolate Malt
-0.50 lbs Roasted Barley

Hops
-1.00 oz Northern Brewer (7.7% AA, 60 minutes)
-1.00 oz Fuggles (4% AA, 60 minutes)
-1.00 oz Mt Hood (3.8% AA, 2 minutes)

Misc
-10 oz Ghirardelli Unsweetened Baker's Cocoa
-12 cup pot of Kona Blend coffee from Wegmans
-1 tsp Wyeast yeast nutrients

Procedure:
-Filled mash tun with all grains except the roasted ones
-Used 3.5 gallons of strike water at ~170F
-Mash settled to 150F, which was a couple degrees cooler than I had intended
-Added the roasted grains with 15 minutes left in the mash to avoid astringency they can produce (based on advice from some homebrewing forums)
-Sparged with 4 gallons of 170F water
-Added the DME then brought to a boil
-Added the Northern Brewer and Fuggles hops
-Boiled for 45 minutes, then added the yeast nutrient
-With 2 minutes left in the boil, added the Mt Hood hops.
-Once the burners were off and the chiller was ready, the coffee and cocoa powder were added
-Chilled, took hydrometer sample, transferred to fermenter, aerated-pitched-aerated, slapped the airlock on

Starting gravity at 70F is 1.074 (adjusted). This is going to be solid.

UPDATE: It's only an hour after pitching the yeast cake, and the airlock is bubbling pretty steadily. This should bode well for some healthy fermentation.

1 comment:

techcommdood said...

Nice starting gravity! Should yield over 6% easy, especially with the bubbling not an hour after locking. This one sounds delicious! Can't wait to try it!