Recipe

This one. No, wait, this one!

Brewing

I'd intended to make a smoked brown porter, but I printed out the wrong recipe when I went to the homebrew store. So I ended up with the ingredients for a smoked robust porter. That smokey brown will have to wait for another day.

This batch is headed for a party in July, so I decided to make 10 gallons instead of my normal 5. Brewing a full 10 gallons on my system pushes it to its limits. This oft-referenced mash tun chart claims I should be able to mash 24 pounds (10.9 kg) of grain at a 1.25 qt/lb (2.6 l/kg) mash thickness. But I'd like to actually see someone achieve that feat. I got about 23 pounds into the mash tun today and couldn't even put the lid on the thing without it overflowing. It took 30 minutes to mash in just because I had to be so slow and careful with the last few pounds of grain.

Really, you think I can fit an extra pound of grain in here?

The full grist weight was 26 pounds, which I knew my would be too much for the tun, so I'd already set aside the crystal and black patent malt to use as steeping grains. A good approach, since these aren't grains you really need to mash. Black patent is only there for color, and crystal malt doesn't need mashing.

The slow mash in led to a mash temp in the high 140s, instead of the 152 I'd wanted. And with no room in the tun I couldn't add any boiling water to up the temp. So the beer will be dryer than intended.

When picking out ingredients I had my choice of 3 smoked malts: peat, rauch and cherrywood. I sampled the grains and decided to go with peat. When I got home I started looking into peat malt only to find a bunch of forum posts saying "Oh god, the peat, it burns! Don't use more than a sprinkling of this stuff!" And this was the grain that made up 20% of my grist. Oh.

But throughout the brew day the peat smelled and tasted fantastic. Some of the best tasting wort that I've ever had, honestly. We'll see how it tastes once the yeast does it job, but so far I'm pleased with the peat malt.

Once fermentation is done I intend to split the batch and do a coffee addition to one of the kegs. I just need to find a coffee that can add enticing, complimentary flavors to this peaty beer.

Recipe

Grist:

• 53% Maris Otter
• 20% Smoked Malt
• 10% Munich Malt
• 10% Simpson's Medium Crystal
• 5% Chocolate Malt
• 2% Black Patent malt

Hops

• 66% Warrior at 60 minutes
• 33% Fuggle at 5 minutes

Mashing

Single infusion mash at 152.

Fermentation

Ferment with a clean, attenuative yeast. English would be traditional, but I think you could go with a US yeast. Keep the fermenter at the low end of the yeast's temperature range: 64-65; this isn't a beer where you want fruity yeast notes. Do a diacetyl rest at the end, if needed.

Post-Fermentation

Carbonate to about 1.7 - 1.9 volumes.

Targets:

• OG: 1.063
• IBU: 38

Background/Notes

Almost identical to the smoked brown porter recipe I posted last week, this beer is a bit stronger and roastier, putting it in the 'robust porter' category. This recipe is even closer to its ancestor, Mad Fermentationist's Alderwood Smoked Imperial Porter, but is scaled back from an OG of 1.073 to 1.063.

Recipe

Grist:

• 55% Maris Otter
• 20% Smoked Malt
• 10% Brown Malt
• 10% Simpson's Medium Crystal
• 5% Chocolate Malt

Hops

• 66% Warrior at 60 minutes
• 33% Fuggle at 5 minutes

Mashing

Single infusion mash at 152.

Fermentation

Ferment with a clean, attenuative yeast. English would be traditional, but I think you could go with a US yeast. Keep the fermenter at the low end of the yeast's temperature range: 64-65; this isn't a beer where you want fruity yeast notes. Do a diacetyl rest at the end, if needed.

Post-Fermentation

Carbonate to about 1.7 - 1.9 volumes.

Targets:

• OG: 1.061
• IBU: 37

Background/Notes

After having several smoked porters that I quite enjoyed I thought, "Why haven't I ever made one of these?" Hence this recipe. This is based on a recipe from Mad Fermentationist, which in turn comes from Brewing Classic Styles, so it has an excellent family history. Both of their recipes were stronger than what I was looking for, as they were robust porters. So I toned down the OG a little and swapped out the Munich malt for brown malt, bringing it back to brown porter territory.

Recipe

This way.

Brewing

Last October we had a 4-batch brew day. That was a lot of fun, so we planned another. As proof that the homebrewing hobby is growing, our number of batches almost doubled! 7 brewers made 7 batches of beer in about 6 hours. The batches were:

1. My 9 gallons of Northern English Brown
2. 5 gallons of Dead Ringer using a new 3-tier setup
3. 1 gallon of Caribou Slobber using snow for the water instead of tap. Yeah, probably not the best. Not my batch.
4. 1 gallon of Caribou Slobber using normal water.
5. 5 gallons of BIAB Multigrain Red
6. 5 gallons of BIAB Caribou Slobber
7. 5 gallons of the extract version of Tonguesplitter

A very busy brewday resulting in 31 gallons of wort.

My batch was surprisingly easy. Other than a slightly low mash temp that I quickly rectified, all the numbers look great. This easy brew gave me the chance to eat too many donuts. As I did last time, I gave 1 gallon of wort to anyone who asked. 3 other brewers will ferment their gallons and we'll meet up later for a taste test.

This was my first time trying my new Aspen wort chiller and my initial impression is favorable. As advertised, it cooled the wort quite efficiently. Sadly my phone died halfway through the chill, so I don't have an exact time, but I had 9+ gallons of boiling wort down to 65 degrees in under 20 minutes. Chilling took about 20 gallons of water.

The nice thing about the Aspen is that the first 6-8 gallons of water that come out of it are blazingly hot. Almost boiling. That makes it great for mixing up PBW or for filling a bucket of cleaning water. Very nice.

Recipe

Grist:

• 80% Maris Otter
• 8% Crystal 40
• 6% Biscuit Malt
• 6% Pale Chocolate

Hops

• 53% Phoenix at 60 minutes
• 47% East Kent Goldings at 5 minutes

Mashing

Single infusion mash at 149.

Fermentation

Ferment with a attenuative, malty English strain. I'm going to try Wyeast 1098. Keep the fermenter in the 65-66 degree range. Do a diacetyl rest at the end, if needed.

Post-Fermentation

Carbonate to about 1.7 - 1.9 volumes.

Targets:

• OG: 1.052
• IBU: 26

Background/Notes

A style that I've never made before, so this recipe is a mix of ones in Brewing Classic Styles and Brown Ale. I'm relying on the biscuit and pale chocolate malts for the 'nutty...toasted, biscuity' flavors called for in the style. IBUs are low to push the malt flavor forward and the mash temp is low to encourage attenuation -- Northern browns are dryer than Southern ones.

Recipe

Check it out

Brewing

I wanted to make this a quick brew day, but I also wanted to stick to an all-grain version of my recipe. So I decided to make a small batch, just 3 gallons, and mash with the brew in a bag technique. This let me use less equipment and do the entire brew inside -- perfect since today was a rainy mess of a day. This approach let me cut an hour off of my brew day, but still let me make an all-grain beer. Goal achieved.

BIAB threw me a couple of curveballs that required some on-the-fly adjustments. My water calculations include adjustment for the wort lost to the mash tun's false bottom. No false bottom in BIAB, so I ended up with more wort than expected. I boosted the gravity with some dextrose and increased the hops proportionally. I also found it very hard to keep the mash at a constant temperature. My efficiency may have suffered as a result, and the effects on the beer's body and attenuation remain to be seen. A brewer friend of mine tells me that I should have just kept it in an oven set to 150. I will have to try that next time. And there should be a next time, as I like this approach for brewing small test batches.

I also began using a pH meter today, which was interesting. I did some fairly significant adjustments to my water for this beer trying to boost the calcium and sulfate levels. My attempts at hoppy beers have rarely turned out well, but as I've tried more water adjustment the results have improved. I wanted to make sure the tweaking wasn't throwing off the mash pH, hence the meter. It's also great for testing a batch of StarSan to make sure it's still effective. Maybe not the most vital piece of equipment, but it'll find a home in my brewery.

Recipe

Grist:

• 86% Maris Otter
• 9% Amber Malt
• 5% Golden Naked Oats

Hops

• 44% Phoenix at 60 minutes
• 28% East Kent Goldings at 0 minutes
• 28% Progress at 0 minutes

Mashing

Single infusion mash at 149.

Fermentation

Ferment with a highly attenuative English strain. White Labs 007 is a good one. Keep the fermenter in the 66-68 degree range. Do a diacetyl rest at the end, if needed.

Post-Fermentation

Carbonate to about 1.5 - 1.7 volumes.

Targets:

• OG: 1.045
• IBU: 41

Background/Notes

Another attempt at a mid-strength English Bitter. The big difference in this version is the introduction of amber malt and golden naked oats. Amber should push the color slightly darker, while providing some flavor complexity. I've never used amber malt before, so it's a bit of a wild card. The oats I hope bring some fruity/berry notes and a creamy aspect to the body.

I'm also pushing the IBU contribution higher, to a 90% IBU/GU ratio, and adding all of the bitterness in the 60-minute addition. Combine that with a low mash temp of 149 and you should have a dry, bitter-forward beer. I want this batch to live up to its stylistic name -- Bitter. A mix of Goldings and Progress at the end should provide a decent hop aroma.

You could probably add some dry hops, if you're so inclined. The beer certainly won't suffer for it.

Recipe

Right here

Brewing

The big question in my recipe was, "What will the OG be?" Not having caramelized any wort before, I wasn't really sure how much of the water I would boil off during the process. Let's do some math to illustrate the point.

Let's say I have a bucket that contains 3 gallons of first runnings with a gravity of 1.073, and I have a bucket that contains 4 gallons of second runnings with a gravity of 1.035. If I combined these buckets I'd have 7 gallons of wort with a gravity of:

((3/7) * 73) + ((4/7) * 35) = 51.28

Ok, easy enough. But say I take 1 gallon of the first runnings and boil it down until it caramelizes; if that leaves me with 1 quart of that initial gallon, then I have 6.25 gallons of wort with the gravity:

((2/6.25) * 73) + ((4/6.25) * 35) + ((.25/6.25) * 292) = 57.44

Boil that wort down until it's a pint and you get 6.12 gallons of wort with gravity:

((2/6.12) * 73) + ((4/6.12) * 35) + ((.12/6.12) * 608) = 58.64

Further reductions result in smaller and smaller effects on the gravity of the combined worts.

So, the gravity of my initial recipe was a guess about how much I would have to reduce that gallon of first runnings before it caramelized. I guessed it would I would end up with about a quart of caramelized wort, which wasn't too far off from the truth.

I expect that if you took my recipe and had no unexpectedly high efficiencies or evaporation rates, you would end up with an original gravity of around 1.054. I, however, did not. Extraction efficiency was about 5% higher than I'd planned for, as was my evaporation rate. So my porter is starting at 1.063. The right thing to have done in this case was probably to dilute the wort during the boil to get it back to the right gravity. But I never thought to do that, so it's a strong porter for me.

The gravity jump might dissuade me from entering this beer into competitions, but I'll have to taste it before I know for sure. NHC registration opens long before the beer will be ready, though. I'm as yet undecided if I'll enter it into NHC or not.

I also started adjusting my water more thoroughly with this batch. This water report from a local brewing club using the same water as me matches what I've found in my own research, so I used it as a starting point for filling out Bru'n Water and tweaking my water to get closer to Bru'n's "Brown Malty" water profile. I ended up using a small addition of gypsum (1.1 g total) and slightly more calcium chloride (3.2g total). I also, at the recommendation of a few different people, acidifed my sparge water with about 9ml of 10% phosphoric acid.

Did any of those water adjustments improve the beer? Only time will tell, I guess.

Recipe

Grist:

• 85% Maris Otter
• 10% Brown Malt
• 5% Chocolate Malt

Hops

• 47% Phoenix at 60 minutes
• 37% Fuggles at 20 minutes
• 26% Fuggles at 0 minutes

Mashing

Single infusion mash at 152.

The Boil

Take 1 gallon of your first runnings and boil it until it caramelizes. If you dip a spoon into it and the liquid hardens as you pull the spoon out, you're there. After boiling, return this carmelized wort to the kettle. Proceed with the boil as normal.

Fermentation

Ferment with a malty, attenuative English strain. I like Wyeast 1335. Keep the fermenter in the 65-67 degree range. Do a diacetyl rest at the end, if needed.

Post-Fermentation

Carbonate to about 2 volumes.

Targets:

• OG: 1.051 (see notes)
• IBU: 32

Background/Notes

The recipe is a tweak of my crystal-free porter from a few months ago. It did well at the Upper Mississippi Mashout, and I liked drinking it, so I decided to make some small adjustments and brew a batch for competitions. The biggest change is to caramelize a smaller volume of wort, but to really caramelize it. This idea came from a presentation by Joe Formanek at the 2013 Mashout.

The target OG in this recipe is what you'd get if you didn't caramelize a gallon of your first runnings. Your actual OG will be higher, because you'll've boiled off most of that gallon of wort during caramelization. My estimate is that the real OG will be about 1.054.

Recipe

Pretty much the same as last year's batch.

Brewing

Just like last year, this was a super-simple extract batch. Unlike last year, I updated my techniques to follow some suggestions from the recipe's originator Steve Piatz. Instead of chilling, the still-hot wort is currently sitting in my kitchen in a partially-covered bucket. Quite simply the easiest and fastest brew day ever: measure water, measure DME, boil, dump it in a bucket. The whole thing took under two hours. Tomorrow or Monday I'll pitch some 1056 and let it go a week before pitching Wyeast's lambic blend (3278).

I tossed an oak spiral into last year's batch which, once it's nice and buggy, will be moved to this year's batch. Then I can pitch it into each subsequent batch.

Next step for the lambic will probably come this summer, when I plan on putting 2 gallons of the 2012 batch onto some fresh Door County cherries and make a kriek.