I'm catching up with all my recent brewing now... I brewed the Northern Brewer Russian Imperial Stout kit a few weeks back, enhanced with an extra half pound of victory malt and 2 more pounds of 2 row.
Everything was going pretty well with the brew session until I ran out of propane.
A tense 10 minutes went by while I pulled my stove out to allow my keggle to clear the microwave. It was really, really, dangerously heavy with 7 gallons of wort still in it. I also found out that the bottom edge gets and stays very very hot, hot enough to burn your welding gloves in fact. I got this monster on the stove by first lifting in onto a chair, then standing on another chair and lifting it to the stove. On the stove I had it straddling 2 burners and the boil still sucked.
So after all that, with a planned 90 minute boil I didn't get near the evaporation rate I usually do and ended up with an extra gallon of 1.080 beer rather than the 1.098 batch I was shooting for. So now I have a 1.080 stout with 75 IBU's aging in a carboy in my basement.
So far it tastes smooth, but bitter. I was worried about fusel alcohols with this one, but they weren't a problem.
Post boil, I added a drop of olive oil to my fermentation bucket to aid the yeast. Then I opened my keggle valve and drained the hot wort directly to the ferm. bucket. After a day or 2 of cooling I added US-05 that I harvested from a pale ale and shook the crap out of it, and it proceeded to blow off for several days.
