First Porter

[welly2]

The boil for my first ever porter has just finished. It's looking good and the wort is tasting proper! Made a small batch of 10L. Seem to be hitting all the marks - pre-boil gravity was 1.045. Sparging ran as to plan, wort was clear into the kettle, very pleased as it's been a while since I last made a batch of beer.



Currently cooling the wort although given the water temperature being about 28c, I'll get it down to about that and then I'm going to stick it in the fermenting fridge for the night before I stick the yeast in. Does that sound like a plan?

 

[Reman]

Looks good! I also do 10l batches as it's the perfect size for me for variety and drinking volumes.

What recipe did you use?

With my porter I found it was reasonably clear out of the kettle, but went very murky in the fermenter and has stayed that way. Hasn't effected the taste though.

I found the trick with drinking was to leave it for 10 minutes after pouring to allow the temp to come up to around 8-9c and some of the bubbles to come out. Drinking it too cold and too bubbly made it a very boring experience. Leaving it for a bit makes it extremely tasty.

Good luck!

 

[welly2]

I'm going to do a few more 10L batches - actually going to build a smaller boiling kettle as my 50L boiling kettle isn't really ideal for making such small amounts - so I can experiment a bit more without having to deal with 40 odd bottles of beer (not necessarily a bad thing!) and get my processes in place. It's easier to move 10L about than 20+!

I'm still having a bit of a problem in a few areas. Mainly not getting hop muck into the fermenter. I guess it's a matter of just keeping at it and learning from my previous mistakes but certainly this brew went better than the last, which went better than the one before it. My fly sparging went probably faster than it should have done, although I guess with a much smaller amount of volume then it's not going to take the recommended 20 minutes. But there's some progress at least!

As for the recipe:

- Pale Malt (2 row) - 71.4%
- Black Patent - 10.2%
- Caramel/Crystal (20L) - 8.9%
- Chocolate malt - 5.1%
- Munich malt - 4.5%
- 35.8g Fuggles

I actually used the Robust Porter recipe that came with beersmith and scaled the recipe to 10L, which will probably explain the weird %ages. Being as this is going to be 2 weeks in the fermenter and 30 days aging, I'd better think about getting another brew on the go that'll be ready sooner!

 

[Nicko83]

I'm with you guys. I mostly brew into 15 litre fermenters. Less bottling + more variety = more brewing!!

 

[Reman]

No brown malt!?!? You'd get chucked out of the Porter Brewers Club

Seriously though that is fair whack of black patent! Mine was 83,4% pale malt, 10% brown and 6.6% chocolate.

Was the fuggles all at 60min?

 

[welly2]

No brown malt!?!? You'd get chucked out of the Porter Brewers Club

Seriously though that is fair whack of black patent! Mine was 83,4% pale malt, 10% brown and 6.6% chocolate.

Was the fuggles all at 60min?

Yeah, 60 minute guffles! I know.. no brown malt. I should make it again and stick a bit of brown in it to get my PBC card back. It's all an experiment at the moment!

IPA up next.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

I actually used the Robust Porter recipe that came with beersmith and scaled the recipe to 10L, which will probably explain the weird %ages. Being as this is going to be 2 weeks in the fermenter and 30 days aging, I'd better think about getting another brew on the go that'll be ready sooner!

Welcome to the wonderfull world of Porter....If you like dark beer, then porter the style for you

Try using different dark Xtals like cararoma etc..

Not to sure about 10% Black Patent malt....that is A LOT....and I mean A LOT

Try using bittering only additions as well.... really brings the grains out

 

[welly2]

Welcome to the wonderfull world of Porter....If you like dark beer, then porter the style for you

Try using different dark Xtals like cararoma etc..

Not to sure about 10% Black Patent malt....that is A LOT....and I mean A LOT

Try using bittering only additions as well.... really brings the grains out

Cheers Stu. It is pretty dark, I admit, which I assume the black contributed somewhat to! What hops would you recommend other than fuggles? I'll certainly make another porter sometime soon so will chuck a bit of brown in as well. Looking at this recipe from http://byo.com/hops/item/155-back-in-black-the-truth-about-black-patent-malt

• 9.0 lbs. (4.1 kg) American pale malt
• 3.0 lbs. (1.4 kg) Munich malt (10 °L)
• 1.0 lb. (0.45 kg) American Black Patent malt (500 °L)
• 0.67 lbs. (0.30 kg) American crystal malt (60 °L)
• 14 AAU Magnum hops (60 mins)
  (1.0 oz./28 g of 14% alpha acids)

[*]5.8 AAU Cascade hops (10 mins)

• (1.0 oz./28 g of 5.75% alpha acids)

[*]2.0 oz. (57 g) Willamette hops (0 min)
[*]Wyeast 1056 (American Ale), White Labs WLP001 (California Ale) or Safale US-05 yeast
The black quantity is up there! Apparently a Sierra Nevada stout clone. I had a taste of the wort and from what I've just read about black patent, my beer doesn't have the charcoal flavours that seems to come with black patent. Obviously it's pretty sweet at this point and the hops are fairly prominent but the wort is tasty. We shall see in a few weeks though!

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

POR goes great in porter

 

[Reman]

That looks very American and stout-ish, which is ok if you like that kind of thing. And depending on the OG I'd say that 20IBUs total is a little low and it would end up pretty sweet. Porters tend to be more brown and chocolate malt rather than black patent.

The hops for mine was 25IBUs of Fuggles at 60min and 5IBUs of EKG at 15min to get a little floral going. I used Safale S-04 for the yeast at 18c.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Robust Porter at 45 IBU is rather nice

 

[welly2]

That looks very American and stout-ish, which is ok if you like that kind of thing. And depending on the OG I'd say that 20IBUs total is a little low and it would end up pretty sweet. Porters tend to be more brown and chocolate malt rather than black patent.

The hops for mine was 25IBUs of Fuggles at 60min and 5IBUs of EKG at 15min to get a little floral going. I used Safale S-04 for the yeast at 18c.

According to beersmith, it reports the IBU being 38.4. This is based on a 10L batch. Anyway, it's in the fermenter, we shall see what becomes of it! On to my next batch next week!

 

[Reman]

Yep, ignore what I said I just added the AAUs to be the IBUs.

What's the SG and predicted FG, I'm guessing it will probably end up around 1.016ish?

 

[welly2]

SG ended up being much, much lower than was predicted, which was both annoying and puzzling. Although due to a feck up on my part in beersmith, I sparged more water in than the recipe suggested, which wouldn't have helped one bit! Should have been 9 litres, ended up being almost 11 litres. SG was 1.046, should have been 1.056 and the predicted FG is 1.020. So I will no doubt have the world's most mid-strength porter! Luckily I'll only have 10 litres of it And anyway, it's still beer!

Edit. In hindsight I should have boiled for another half an hour (boil was for 60 minutes) which might have somewhat fixed the excess sparge water.