Husky Lad Mild Porter

Hey there readers! As you already know, I was right in the middle of another brew day when I last posted, so obviously it's time to post about the next beer! I am very excited about this one, as it is a sort of concept beer. I find that concept beers help creativity by giving brewers different parameters to explore in each recipe. This is why I love doing things like single-malt and single-hop (SMaSH) beers, hybrid styles like Belgian IPA and Belgian mild, and high-quality session (less than 5%--in many cases less than 4%) versions of beers. Thusly, drawing inspiration from one of my favorite recipes, the Westminster Porter, as well as one of my favorite and oft-revisited styles, English mild, I formulated a recipe for a flavorful low-abv dark beer that will be quick to mature and perfect for early fall. Here's the husky lad, then:

Target OG: 1.039

Target FG: 1.013

Target ABV: 3.5%

Target SRM: 27 L

6 lbs Maris Otter

1 lb brown malt

8 oz Special B malt

8 oz black patent malt

Mashed trains at 154, then I realized that I had about 

5 oz coconut palm sugar

So I added it to the wort. It has a great flavor and should help the beer to have a nice dry, roasty finish.

Hop schedule is as follows:

1 oz East Kent Goldings (4.5% AA) @60 min

1 oz EKG @30 min

1 oz EKG dry hop (because why not...I love dry hopping beers even when it is minimal and the beer is malt-forward. The EKG character should make for a beautiful, balanced beer)

Then I pitched WLP002 English Ale yeast

I had another excellent brew day, and ended up with beautiful wort the color of chocolate sauce that smelled and tasted of toasted bread crusts, coffee and sweet toffee. Fermentation is still going, but starting to slow down. WLP002 is very floccullent, and I cleared the beer with a whirlfloc tablet, so this should be a very clear, beautiful dark beer with those signature brown porter garnet hues. I can't wait to taste this one. I think it will be a recipe worthy of repeating, especially because of the low cost and sessionability. Anyway, we shall see! Until next time...cheers!

Post-move return to the game

Greetings, readers! It has been quite a while. After a couple of wonderful summer brews, including several repeatable highlights, a few factors led to a temporary hiatus, including lots of time away from home and a move to a new apartment (more about that in a second). While I have missed brewing a great deal, I am supremely excited for my next reboot. With the new apartment, I have enough room again for my homemade four-tap kegerator! Naturally, I had to plan out four brilliant batches to go on it first. 

I wanted to do a few simple-but-wonderful explorations, with one really wild "homebrew"-style beer. As such, it's now time to play "One of these things is not like the others":

Belgian Honey Blonde: a classic exploration of a 6-7% abv flavorful Belgian blonde, but instead of the classic candi sugar, I will use honey. Honey is awesome and I love the floral subtleties it adds to beer.

"Mild Porter": a porter-inspired English mild, so named because it will straddle the line between robust mild and low-abv porter 

SMaSH English IPA: a big ol' English IPA using only Maris Otter (my all-time favorite base malt) and East Kent Goldings. I bought my first-ever 1-pound bag of hops, because I will be using a great deal of EKG in the IPA, and I will also be using them in ALL FOUR OF THESE BEERS, so it will be a total EKG party.

PSL Stout: make fun if you want, but I love pumpkin beers, and I do crave a pumpkin spice latte from time to time when the air gets colder and crisper and the leaves start changing colors. This beer will be a coffee milk stout brewed with pumpkin and a potion of pie spices. I haven't been into making many crazy flavored things lately, mostly because I like the classic ingredients speak for themselves, but this idea just seemed too delicious to pass up.

Return of the four-tapper! Woohoo!

Westminster 1839 Porter Brew Day & Ordinary People Bottling

Tuesday morning, I went outside to grab my mash tun for some cleaning, and I knew that day had to be brew day. I prepped everything, got my mash going, and did a bunch of cleaning and sanitizing during the mash. During the boil, I racked Ordinary People to secondary, because I needed the yeast for the porter but there was still a little ferm action in the jug. I bottled it today, as FG was on point and fermentation had clearly died down. Ended up with 9 bottles of what should be a very tasty session beer.

Brew day of the porter went really well. I was very conscientious about sanitation, wort chilling was fast and efficient, the whirlpool/trub removal went really well, and I pitched a nice large volume of healthy yeast. Additionally, I collected a heaping volume of wort that I ended up boiling down for about an hour before adding my first hop addition, and the extra kettle caramelization should result in a really nice malt profile. My efficiency was 69%, which is a little low for my system (I usually get somewhere between 70-75%), but I still got an OG of 1.051, which should still give me a really nice ~5% ABV beer. I am really looking forward to this one, as the original version of this recipe (everything the same, but fermented with a different yeast strain) was my single favorite batch I've ever brewed. Here are a couple shots from brew day:

Blanket-insulated mash tun:

Siphoning Ordinary People to secondary to finish fermentation:

Siphoning clear, trub-free wort after the whirlpool:

Prost!

My return to the game

For those of you that have been faithful readers of this blog in the past, you are well aware of the fact I haven't been brewing much in the last couple of years, as well as my propensity for lengthy (sometimes involuntary) hiatuses. Frankly, this makes me sad. I have plenty of free time, a little disposable income, and a fiery passion for beer. I would like to return to the days when I was brewing more consistently, firstly because I miss having homebrew in the house. Secondly--and perhaps most importantly--beer is a creative outlet for me. I'm starting to feel like a bedridden Keith Jarrett with all of these ideas whirring around in my head and nowhere to exercise them, and at this point I feel like I owe it to myself to get things rolling again. I'm hoping these upcoming batches will serve as my very own The Melody at Night, with You. 

Recently, I read an article (which I of course can't relocate at the moment, but for which I will post a link when I do find it) about brewing one-gallon batches of in lieu of making yeast starters (small batches of unhopped beer meant solely to stimulate yeast growth and get a proper volume of yeast to pitch into a 5-gallon batch). I don't always make starters, but in an attempt to hone my methods a bit and take my beer to the next level, I'm going to try and avoid underpitching from hear on out. To save my more casual beer fans from too much jargon, this way the yeast will do what it's supposed to, and the beer will taste better and be the correct ABV.

I have planned a simple but classic 1-gallon ordinary bitter to build up a nice yeast cake for my all-time favorite recipe, the Westminster 1839 Porter. Here are the two recipes:

Ordinary People:

Target OG: 1.038

Target FG: 1.012

Target ABV: 3.3%

Target IBU: 29

Projected SRM: 12°L (copper/amber)

1 lb Maris Otter

4 oz Crystal 60L

1 oz brown sugar

12 g (for accuracy) East Kent Goldings @30 min

7 g East Kent Goldings @flameout

WLP002 English Ale yeast

Westminster 1839 Porter:

Target OG: 1.057

Target FG: 1.019

Target ABV: 5%

Target IBU: 45

Projected SRM: 32°L (VERY dark, almost opaque)

8 lbs Maris Otter

2 lbs Brown malt

8 oz Black patent malt

2.5 oz Fuggles @60 minutes

1.5 oz Fuggles @5 minutes

WLP002 English Ale yeast cake from Ordinary People

I'm very excited about these. The porter was really tasty last time, and I just love a good, quaffable English bitter. If the porter comes out as well as last time, I've got my eye on a May competition in Philly...but more on that later.

Thanks for reading, and PROST!

1839 Westminster Porter

Westminster Porter FTW!

Smoky the brown is doing very well right now, and I'm pretty set on "darkening" that one when I keg it, as I can't really see any issue with that.  I set my sights now on the next brew day, in which I will be brewing my first ever historic recipe.  I was fumbling around on the internet for a historical porter recipe and I came upon one that looked rather accessible and completely do-able with modern ingredients and processes.  Turns out the one that really struck me was discovered in the 1839 records of the town of Westminster (now a borough of London) in England.  I took this as a sign of divine intervention, that I must brew this beer.  It's not the expected 1/2 pale malt 1/2 brown malt historical porter recipe, which makes it much more reasonable for modern use.  I scaled down the gravity a teensy bit, but kept with the overall recipe.  Here's what I plan on using:

8 lbs Maris Otter
2 lbs Brown Malt
.5 lbs Black Patent Malt

2.5 oz Fuggles @60 min
1.5 oz Fuggles @5 min

Wyeast 1275 Thames Valley Ale

Simple enough, right?  We'll see how this goes.  I'm pretty excited for it, particularly after seeing how easily I could make a wonderful stout with a super simple recipe last winter.  Continuing with the "experimental" nature of my current homebrews, which is pretty fun.  Cheers!

PS I acquired some amazing stuff to expand my system to four taps, and in doing so saved a lot of money.  So excited!  All I need is a cheap used fridge now, which should be quite easy to find.

Category 12: Porter

Beer: Samuel Smith Taddy Porter
Category: Porter
Subcategory: Brown Porter

For those who don't know, there is one very distinct difference between porter and stout. Stout gets its color and flavor from an addition of roasted unmalted barley in the mash (with other dark malts often also contributing to this as well), while porter gets its color (and flavor) just from dark malts, such as chocolate malt, brown malt, or black patent malt. Brown porter is the most traditional example of the style.

Appearance: very dark brown, almost black, with a gorgeous khaki colored tan head with very nice lacing

Aroma: Beautiful. English toffee, dark chocolate/cocoa notes, and very good coffee with a little bit of sweetness.

Flavor: very much like the aroma, but better still...sweet caramel malt taste, and a little bit of bitterness coming both from the hops and the dark malts in the grist--gives the beer a nice hint of coffee/espresso flavor. combination of hops, yeast, and dark malts give the beer a nice little twang at the end

Mouthfeel: smooth, creamy, and wonderful, with a still present carbonation that compliments the flavor character very nicely

Overall/Drinkability: What a treat this was! Samuel Smith makes a lot of delicious beers, but I would have to put this one up front. This has to be one of my favorite porters that I have ever tasted. It's like a good cup of coffee, except with more complexity. Pretty much no flaws...wish I had more of it!