Gravity Sample: Mocha Porter

The fermentation of the coffee-chocolate porter was minimal yesterday and today, so I checked its gravity this evening. It went from 1.074 to 1.018 in 4 days! Nice. That puts it over 7%. The coffee flavor came through beautifully (making it worthy of the name Mocha Porter) with the chocolate actually being fairly subtle, but still providing a good base flavor. It had the silkiness in the mouthfeel from the flaked oats, too. It smelled... roasty. As in a mix of roasted flavors. Definitely something that is waaay young and needs a decent amount of maturation, not to mention it needs to completely finish fermenting, but it's looking gooooood. :) I may rack it to secondary on Sunday (provided it's done bubbling) and just stick it in a closet to condition for a number of weeks.

The brown porter that I kegged on Sunday should be carbonated soon, so I'll probably hook up a tap to it tomorrow or Saturday and give it a taste. It's good to see multiple kegs in my chest freezer. :)

Update: Chocolate Porter

I'm going to refer to this one as just a chocolate porter until I taste it and see how well the coffee came through.

So, the fermentation was really vigorous on this beer starting about an hour after pitching and lasting two solid days. It was tailing off on Tuesday and looked to be pretty minimal this morning. If I don't have to work really late, I intend to take a gravity sample tonight to see where it stands. Here's hoping nothing got seriously messed up (i.e. infected) along the way. Also hoping that it attenuates enough to get under 1.020.

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.