It’s cold here now (well as cold as it gets) and I wanted to brew something that I could age in the garage for a month or two without ill-effects while it was cool. Enter an English brown porter. I’ve used my trusty kit & extract beer designer spreadsheet again and have come up with the following recipe:
1.5KG Briess CBW Porter LME
0.15KG Light DME
0.1KG Bairds Pale Crystal Malt 30EBC
0.25KG Bairds Chocolate Malt 1230EBC
20g Fuggles @ 60 mins 4.6%AA
25g East Kent Goldings @ 5 mins 5.7%AA
12g Fuggles @ 5 mins 4.6%AA
SAFALE S04 English Ale Yeast.
Brew Type: 12L Extract
OG: 1.048
FG: 1.012
ABV: 5.1%
Brown Porter Ingredients (Chocolate Malt/Pale Crystal not shown)
I’ve stuck with a lower ABV brew again as it’s easier to drink (my double can stout is still knocking me from pillar to post). I’ve gone a bit overboard with the specialty grains but what the heck. No sugar this time, just LME for better mouth feel and higher final gravity. And why the 12g of Fuggles @ 5 minutes? That’s all I had left so I thought I should just put it in there.
Method:
1. Steep the light crystal and chocolate malt in cold water in the fridge overnight.
2. I’d put 8L of tap water in my brew kettle overnight to allow the volatiles to evaporate and this was now brought to the boil and the heat turned off.
Straining the Specialty Grains
3. Strained the grains through a colander lined with muslin into the brew pot. Sparged with 1L of 70C water.
4. Added 1KG of the Porter LME to bring the wort gravity up for better hops utilisation.
5. Put heat back on, bring wort to the boil and make first hop addition.
6. Second hop addition made at 55 minutes.
7. At the end of the hour take the kettle off the boil and add the balance of the LME and DME and stir to ensure it is dissolved.
8. Cool wort (there was about 7L left) in ice bath and bring temperature as quickly as possible down to 27C. This took 35 minutes. I sped up the process this time by freezing 2L of boiled water and putting this into the hot wort.
9. Once down to temperature I tipped the wort into the FV passing it through a mesh strainer to pick up most of the hops. I topped off the FV with a couple of liters of cool water, took a temperature (25.2C) and a gravity reading (1.048).
Straining the Wort
10. I aerated the wort as much as possible with a large spoon, pitched the whole packet of S04 yeast, screwed the lid onto the vessel, topped off the airlock with StarSan solution and put the whole lot in my temperature controlled fridge. I set the temperature to 18.5C.
The plan is to allow the beer to ferment for a full two weeks and then rack it off into a secondary for aging (for 2-4 weeks) before bulk priming and bottling. I haven’t decided if I’ll dry hop yet, but given that it’s an English style brown porter it shouldn’t really have a strong hop characteristic. I’ll do some research in the next week or two and decide later.
12/7/2015 – Moved the fermentation vessel into my garage. It’s pretty cool here now (15C or less most days). I’ll leave it there for a few weeks to age.
8/8/2015 – Racked off fermentation vessel into my bottling vessel and bulk primed with 104g of white sugar dissolved in 200mL of boiling water. Made sure to mix beer before bottling. Yield was 16 750mL bottles (12 litres) so the priming was 8g/L. Hopefully there’s a decent head on this brew.
29/8/2015 – Opened the first bottle tonight. Nice bit of roastiness up front, not too much bitterness. Pleasant enough to drink but seemed a little watery. Will be interesting to sample again over the coming weeks. Good white head that lasted to the bottom of the glass with fine bubbles. Overall not too bad at all.
First Glass of Brown Porter