I'm going to write this up as a regular brewday, but there will never be any tasting notes for this beer. After racking from the kettle to the carboy, the carboy toppled and shattered, sending the wort all over the basement floor. So the batch was a total loss.
Recipe
I think I came up with this one all by myself. I wanted a porter with a strong brown malt flavor, but not as strong as my experimental brown. Originally it was only hopped with Fuggles -- hence the name -- but I switched to Target for bittering so that I could put less hop matter in the kettle. The biscuit malt should add some extra nutty characteristics, while the mix of English dark crystal malts brings dark fruit sweetness. I don't know of any porters with this flavor profile; most of the porters made in the US tend towards the 'Robust Porter' category, which I'm not a big fan of. Even the English porters I've tried have barely any brown malt flavor.
Brewing
A simple brew day (well, until the carboy shattered). I've finally gotten to know my all grain setup well enough that a brew day is easy to manage. Efficiency was slightly higher that expected, which is probably due to me milling the grain twice at the store.
Thanks to a recent article in Zymurgy, I've started swirling the immersion chiller around in the wort. This speeds up chilling incredibly. In previous batches I'd chill the wort for 15-20 minutes. This batch went from 200 to 65 in 8 minutes. Of course, I'm also helped by super-cold water because it is winter here in Minnesota. That aside, moving the immersion chiller through the wort during chilling makes the process much faster and efficient.
I'm really interested to see how this recipe works, so I'm planning to brew this beer again in two weeks. Here's hoping that I don't destroy that batch as well.