Homebrewing Process Control Through Simplicity

I was doing some thinking on my reasons for paring down my process to where it is now.  I have been brewing for nearly 10 years now, started doing extract batches, bottling, went to all-grain, built a chiller, grain mill, etc.  I've enjoyed aspects of incorporating all those sub-processes.  There is a lot of personal satisfaction in being able to execute every element of the brewing process.  Someday I'd even like to grow and malt my own barley.  But not now.

Now I have 3 kids, and I just can't focus on all those little processes.  And for as often as I brew, I can't perfect them.  Every additional element added to brewing is also source of error.  If you don't frequently brew, like many who evangelize for the hobby, the simplest tasks can ruin your day.

I don't think you can appreciate this simplification until you have brewed all-grain, ground the grain, chilled the wort and pitched the yeast, then hand washed all the bottles and bottled, and waited.  And some people are able to continue all these tasks regardless of other changes in their life.

But I'm not, and I know this is what keeps others from brewing or knocks them out of the hobby all together.  I'm now enjoying brewing beer in a way that flies in the face of the way I learned from Charlie Papazian.  I take pride in having learned enough about brewing science to tell me that it's ok, and I can still make great beer.

So think of your brewing process this way: every time you can simplify a process, you remove the chance for something to go wrong.  Your chiller can't clog if you hot-pack your wort.  And you won't take silly chances with kicking off your fermentation if you aren't starting it at the end of a 6 hour brewing session at 1am.

My Process - Outlined

Here is my outline for the current state of my brewing methods.  In the upcoming months I plan to put this all fully into practice and document a few brews to show how I vary the process for different recipes.

1.       Brew with extract

I currently brew with extract to simplify and shorten my brew day.  This adds a constraint to your brewing since you don’t have the same flexibility to choose grains.  It has the benefit though of tailoring your boil length to your hop schedule and eliminating a lot of worries.  You also minimize the amount of equipment to clean and store.

2.       Do a full-volume boil and hot-pack the wort

Hot-packing (search No-Chill method) is the best thing to happen to homebrewing since yeast.  Chilling wort is a time consuming PITA.  You are essentially canning your wort so that you can delay fermentation until you are good and ready for it.  For me, this means a shorter overall brew-day, which makes the entire hobby more practical.  The ideal container for this is 5+ gallons, so you really need to have that volume of boiling liquid to put into it.

This method also allows you to double batches and ferment 1 at a time.  Nice if you want to re-use yeast or save a ton of time on beer that you want to have on hand all the time.  Hot-packed wort has been proven to stay fresh for months on basic brewing radio.

3.       Use an anti-foaming agent (Fermcap-S)

I haven’t done this just yet but my first bottle of Fermcap_S is waiting in the fridge.  I’ve often worried about all the hop matter that gets foamed onto the sides of my kettle, and battled for minutes trying to keep the hot break from blowing out all over the driveway.  No more.

4.       Use dry yeast, re-hydrate in water bottle

I almost always use dry yeast, because I don’t want to make starters.  I’m tempted not to re-hydrate for convenience, but I discovered a simple method.  I use a cheap bottle of spring water, pour half out and warm it up in the microwave.  Dump the yeast in and re-cap.  Shake periodically.  Un-cap and pour into fermenter!  This saves me from needing to boil, cool, (contaminate?) my tap water.

5.       Shake to aerate

The process of pouring the wort, coupled with shaking, has always served me well.  I’d rather not add equipment to clean and sanitize.

6.       Ferment in a temp controlled fridge

I have a dorm fridge I bought off Craigslist coupled with an STC-1000 controller off of Amazon.  So now I can temp control my fermentations to the exact degree for less than $100.  This removes so much worry, you need it.

7.       Keg your beer

If I still had to bottle my homebrew I wouldn’t do it.  Bottling is from the devil.  Also, when your beer is in a keg you can have any size beer you want.  I like to come home and “check on the beer”.  It’s a nice way to put beer fest tasting glasses to work!

Star San Slime - Answer from Five Star Chemicals

If you store any of your brewing equipment in a Star-San solution you may have noticed a slimy film on them after they have sat for awhile. I was unable to find an answer on-line so I emailed 5-Star (the maker of Star-San) and here is the reply I got:

Hi Matt, It's the surfactants in starsan coming out of solution. 

Cheers, 
Daisha Barnett 
Five Star Chemicals & Supply, Inc. 

So logically I asked if they had anything else I could use to store brewing parts in, to keep them sanitary right until I need them, and here is the answer: 

How long do you keep them in solution? Saniclean has surfactants as well. 

 I would clean them immediately after use and then throw in a bucket of starsan just prior to use. PH should be 3.5 or below and only needs to come in contact with solution for 30 seconds and you do not need to wait until it dries to use. Over time the chemicals will damage parts if they are stored in it. 

Daisha Barnett 
Five Star Chemicals & Supply, Inc. 

The Simplest Manifesto

It's been a long time since I have used my brewing blog. Since I last wrote anything I've had 2 more kids and gotten a whole lot more busy. My brewing has taken on a new focus, using brewing knowledge to make my own beer by the simplest, worry free methods possible.

When I say worry free I mean fuss free, no longer moving fermenters around the house to control temperature or grinding my own grain. In some cases I am spending a little more money, with more equipment, and sometimes less. 

I'm now brewing exclusively extract beers, with a shortened boil, no-chill, dry yeast, temperature controlled fermentation, and kegging it. I would not still be brewing if not for kegging. Also, if I hadn't simplified other parts of my process this hobby would be similarly un-workable for my current life status. Now I'm putting together a series of posts to describe what I am doing, because I think it will help other brewers who want to brew but don't have time to work at their own brewery.

Mash Tun Coefficient

I've made lots of brewing mistakes lately. One of the biggest was thinking I had nailed the thermal coefficient of my mash tun. I did an experiment to determine this awhile ago and I believe it came out wrong because my dial thermometer was messed up.

If you use a dial thermometer, check it at boiling and make sure that water boils at 212F. If you use a glass thermometer, ensure that you are submerging it properly. It should be marked for the proper submerging depth.

If your not familiar, to calculate the final temperature of a system from the starting temperatures, you multiply the mass of each part times it's temperature and specific heat, add them all up, and divide by the total mass.

So when I say tun coefficient what I really mean is finding the equivalent amount of water that the tun is equivalent to. So in Excel:

Tun = 0.5
Tun Temp = 72F
Water = 2 Gallons
Water Temp = 160F

Final Temperature =((0.5*72F)+(2.0*160F))/(0.5*2)

As long as you reference your cells right, you will be able to modify the tun value until the final temperature you calculate equals what you measure experimentally.

I found a value of 0.26 for my tun, meaning it's thermal mass is equal to 0.26 gallons of water. I fully calculate my mash temps in Excel, and use 0.051 for my equivalent thermal mass of one pound of malt.

Prior to solving this problem I was thinking about building a RIMS mash tun. No need now! I can mash in and hit my temperature as closely as I am able to measure the temperature of my strike water.

Don't forget to check the accuracy of your thermometers!

A Simple Pale Ale

I wanted to put together a simple pale ale, bordering on a bitter blonde ale, and the recipe went something like this:

Ingredients for 3.1 gallons:

6.0lbs 2row pale
0.5lbs C80
0.25lbs Victory

0.25oz Summit 0min
0.3oz Centennial 0min
0.3oz Chinook 0min

Yeast: US-05

Since I don't actively chill my brews, all the 0 minute additions give me about 20 minutes worth of bitterness.

My goal with this beer was to assess the contribution of hops added only at 0 minutes and then left with the wort to chill overnight in the fermenter.

Now that this is fermented and bottled, here are the results. I got quite a bit of bitterness with this hop schedule, maybe a little too much for my preference and this recipe. While I enjoy some beers with really big bitterness, this has a bitterness that sits in the middle of your tounge and lasts. There is minimal hop aroma, and the flavor is definitely there, but it blends well with the malt and is not overdone. I was hoping for HUGE hop flavor, but didn't get it. The flavor is well balanced in this beer but it's not way out in front. Dry hopping might help to bring out the flavor and increase the perception of the hops.

I'm also suspicious of the chinook hops for their bittering qualities, since I have heard that they can be harsh. This beer would be much different if it had the same level of bitterness but it did not linger. I think it would be good to try a similar beer again but with a smoother bittering all-around hop, possible East Kent Goldings.

Ideally, I want to brew beers that have qualities that do not linger, which makes them more drinkable and more enjoyable over the coarse of a pint.

RISky Business

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.

Brewing My Summer Wit

I brewed my summer Wit last week, with a recipe going a little something like this:

For 3 Gallons:
1.0lb Dark Belgian Munich
0.25lb Aromatic
5.0lb 2row Harrington
0.75lb Flaked Oats
0.5lb granulated sugar

0.3oz Centennial hops @ 60 min

0.1oz Coriander @ 0 min
0.2oz Chamomile Tea @ 0 min
Zest of 3 Clementines @ 0 min

Fermented with Fermentis T-58

So far, this one is looking iffy. I know it isn't a wit recipe, but I was hoping to get a combination of characteristics I might enjoy. I made a grave mash miscalculation which lead to me mashing in at 165F, which is 5 degrees warmer than I have ever heard of anyone trying to go. I cooled it down and mashed for 90 minutes, but I don't think this will dry out like I wanted it to. A gravity sample taken after the krausen dropped read 1.016, down from a starting gravity of 1.066. I was hoping to be closer to 1.010, but it really all comes down to how much I like the beer. We will see how it matures once it's bottled.

Stupid Bottle Cleaning Trick

So... Just in case I'm not the last person that figured this out, if you use a bottle brush on a bottle while it's still underwater, it doesn't flick cleaning solution all over.

I had always tried to avoid using a bottle brush since it flung so much cleaning solution all over, but I just realized that using it underwater in a tub or basin works really well.

Dreaming Up a Wit For Summer

I'm currently musing up a recipe for a strongish Belgian Wit for the summer, based loosely on the Wit show from the Jamil Show (that Doc actually did).

1.5 lbs of flaked oats
1.0 lbs of white wheat malt
0.3 lbs of aromatic malt
Enough pale 2 row to get to 1.070

Mashed at 148-150

First Wort Hopped with Centennial

No-Chill - with orange zest, coriander, and chamomile in the bucket

Fermented with Fermentis T-58, I had a Wit at Niagara Tradition last year made with this yeast and it had some nice aromatics - for cheap dry yeast prices!

AWOG 2nd Place Wood Aged Beer

I submitted my Hippoportamus to the Western New York homebrew competition, the Amber Waves of Grain, and it won 2nd in it's category (smoked or wood aged beers). The main detraction listed by the judges seemed to be that the oak character was too subtle. I agree that it is subtle, but I made it that way because I wanted the oak to blend nicely in with the big brown ale flavors and not dominate the beer.

I only have 6 bottles of it left, and every one has been really enjoyable.

I also entered a brown ale in the Pearl Street Grill and Brewery quarterly homebrew competition. It's on the bitter / hoppy end of the spectrum for a medium gravity brown ale. I brewed it as a continuing test of my new process, most of the hops were added at the end of the boil and then the wort was added to the fermenting bucket near boiling, so that it cools slowly without any effort from me.

It turned out clean, uninfected, hoppy, crisp and I liked it - which is the most important part when you are a homebrewer. So far the no-chill process does everything I need it to do.

I will post the Pearl Street Results when they come out.

Whirlpool Oaking Expirement

I have been no-chill brewing lately. And I'm interested in doing a primary fermentation on oak, like a Firestone Walked Double Barrel Ale clone. So tonight I conducted a brief expirement to see if adding an oak cube to 2oz of boiling water and allowing it to cool would create any undesireable flavors.

The sample tasted woody, with vanilla and Lincoln Log. (if you ever bit a Lincoln Log when you were a kid you know exactly what I mean). Overall, I didn't taste anything bad so now I'm going to try it out in a batch of beer.

Brewing the Hippoportamus

Here is the recipe for 6 gallons:

(mashed at 152F)
12.3 lb 2 row pale malt
1.0 lb white wheat malt
1.1 lb brown malt
0.7 lb chocolate malt (350l)
1.1 lb Crystal (40l)

0.85 oz of magnum pellets (14.4% AA) for 60 min

The brew session started right after my wife and I put our son Noah to bed. She brewed with me start to finish for the first time for one of my birthday presents. It was nice to have some helping hands and fun to share my hobby with her.

We ground all 16.2 lbs of malt by hand using my corona mill. It took awhile to grind but we had it done before the sparge water was ready. I have since purchased a 5 gallon bucket from Lowe's to keep crushed grain in, allowing me to complete this task during free time before brew day.

I calculated my water salt addition for the mash using Palmer's spreadsheet (www.howtobrew.com), but I cut the addition in half. I do this to avoid going overboard with my water adjustment. My brewing water is pretty good, and Tim Herzog at Flying Bison says they don't adjust their water at all.

The mash tun held temperature within a degree or so. We finished collecting our first runnings 75 minutes after mashing in. They were taken outside to the keggle and we got it fired up so that it could begin heating while we collected the second runnings. This saves time and we reached a boil 40 minutes after mashing was complete.

The boil went normally and I added hops at 60 minutes and irish moss (which I re hydrated ahead of time) at 15 minutes.

This is another no-chill brew, so at the completion of boiling I put a lid on the keggle, turned the burner off, and put it away in the garage to cool until the following evening.

The next day I rehydrated my yeast and went out to the garage with all my sanitized equipment to fill up my fermenter from the keggle. I got about 5.5 gal of wort with 0.75 gal of trub and hops left over in the bottom.

The yeast was pitched right away while the wort was at 57 degrees. I aerated by shaking the bucket until the airlock stopped bubbling backwards. Fermentation started a day later and slowly oozed gunk and yeast through the airlock bubbler for several days (even though I was using an ale pail). This is the most vigorous fermentation I have had. After 4 days I moved the fermenter upstairs to allow it to finish warmer. The initial stage of fermentation happened at 66F, (4 degrees warmer than ambient) and the second stage was at 70 - 72.

After one week in the primary fermenter the beer was transferred to my carboy and the medium toast American oak cubes were added. At this point fermentation still seems to be finishing up, though I did not take a gravity reading. To steam the cubes I placed 2oz of them in a pyrex measuring cup with a few ounces of water and cooked them in the microwave for 2 min. The smell was amazing, and I really hope they impart a similar character to the beer. It was tricky to spoon the cubes into the carboy. In the future a large funnel would be nice to just dump them in.

After 1 month of aging with the oak cubes I bottled 51 bottles of my oaky new brew with 4oz of granulated sugar (on Jan 1st). I have a bad cold, but from what I could tell it was great. Candi also tasted it and thought it was good, so I'm expecting the final carbonated beer to be excellent.

Hippoportamus

After brewing Jamil's brown porter I'm inspired to brew something bigger for the winter. I plan to multiply my base malt by 1.4 and my other grains by 1.1 to get close to a 1.070 starting gravity. Then I will substitute 1 pound of base malt for a pound of wheat malt to aide in head "creamyness". I will also use the recommended 350L chocolate, rather than an adjusted amount at 450L. Hops will be altered to only a bittering addition, but scaled appropriately in IBU's for the gravity. Finally, this beer will be finished on american oak cubes, becuase I haven't oaked before and I want to.

Hop Harvest Autumn Ale - Brewing

I'm brewing this beer while also watching my son by myself, so the brewing session is getting tweaked a bit. I mashed in right at my target of 158, and after dough-in I didn't open the tun until the full hour had passed. I did this to see how well some of my cooler modifications worked to hold temperature. After 60 minutes I had a temperature drop of only 2 degrees! I will write another post to cover what I did, since before extra insulation my mash would drop 6 to 8 degrees per hour.

I did all my water volume and temperature calculations using Mash Water 3.3. After mashing for 60min at 158-6, I batch sparged. My typical batch sparge consists of a mashout (add boiling water), vorlauf, sparge, and then add the remaining sparge water, vorlauf, and do the second sparge. I started my mash at 6:00, and finished my batch sparge at 7:30. Nice and quick.

Here's where things get tricky. I sparged into 2 "Ale Pales" and had to leave the wort for awhile while I played with my son and got him ready for bed. So far so good, now it's 9:30 and I'm in the driveway boiling some wort, having a beer, enjoying Fall, and life is really good. Thank you God, seriously, thank you.

At 10:30 I threw the "20 minute" hops into the kettle after turning the burner off. I put the lid on the kettle and put it in the garage to cool for a day. I pitched one package of US-05 about 24 hours later, and had fementation activity by 7:30am.

I noticed upon transferring the beer into my carboy that it was still very cloudy. Then I remembered the Irish Moss, about 24.5 hours too late. So this may turn out to be a cloudy beer. I've never had a beer with so little trub on the bottom of the kettle.

I had trouble tasting the beer while I was transferring since I have a cold.

While I was shaking the carboy to aerate it I noticed that not much air was diffusing into the wort. I've noticed that when I chill quickly and then shake the carboy with an airlock on it that it bubbles in reverse as air goes into solution, and this time I didn't get much of that. It seems like a beer that cools in an unsealed container would allow air (including oxygen) to diffuse in over the cooling period, so I didn't do much shaking and fermentation activity looks good so far. O.G. was 1.045 so it shouldn't have much trouble fermenting out even if the aeration was less than optimal.

On Tuesday Oct. 6th I moved the fermenter from my 66 degree basement to the colder garage. Nights have been getting colder here and I'm trying to get all the haze I can to precipitate. It still looks pretty cloudy though (on October 13th). Note that I do not use a secondary. I plan to bottle it October 15th.

October 22 - Filled 55 bottles with primed beer. I add 0.5oz of table sugar per gallon per volume of CO2, and since my beer was at ~50degrees I added 1.3 volumes of CO2 (since 50 degree beer already contains 1.2 volumes of CO2).

At bottling time the beer was cloudy, with little to no hop aroma and a very faint hop flavor. Overall bitterness was low. It was full bodied but not sweet at all, and actually tasted slightly tart. I think I could taste the rye, but overall flavor perception was quite low. When I was drinking some of the primed beer I could also taste the peach flavor that Jamil Z. says US-05 can produce. I'm hoping for the flavor to be a bit brighter once it carbonates and then clears (after extra time in the fridge to drop the haze).

Hop Harvest Autumn Ale - Recipe

My goal with this beer is to brew a malty Fall beer that I can bitter/flavor with my first homegrown hop harvest. I'm going to use a malt bill inspired by a Vienna Lager, a Scotch Ale inspired 158 degree mash, US-05 dry ale yeast, and my entire ~2ish ounce hop harvest. I want something with significant body and a lot of flavor balanced between malt and hops.

For malt I will be using (6 gallon batch):
6lbs - Harrington 2 row
2lbs - Belgian Dark Munich
1lbs - Rye Malt
1lbs - Thomas Faucett Amber Malt

For hops(adjusted for no-chill method):
0.4oz Willamette - 80min
0.5oz Cascade - 20min
0.5oz Columbus - 20min

Using the No-Chill adjustments 80min hops are actually boiled for 60 min, and 20min hops are added to the container where the wort is allowed to chill and are not boiled. I'm expecting to get 23+ IBU's from this hopping schedule, though my hops are home grown so there's no telling what percent alpha acid they are.

This is going to be my first No-Chill beer, so I'm interested to taste the bitterness contributed by the hops used during the slow chill. For those not familiar with the technique, "No-Chill" refers to a method of brewing whereby the wort is moved to a second container while still near boiling temperature, and then left to cool. This has been described at great length on a few homebrewing forums. For this session I plan to just leave my keggle out in the garage with the lid on until it's ready to siphon to my carboy and pitch.

Flying Bison Visit

My brother and I took a few bottles of my recently brewed brown porter over to the nearby Flying Bison Brewery in Buffalo. It was a chance to get that beer tasted by someone knowledgeable and get my brother into a brewery shortly after his 21st birthday.

Owner Tim Herzog was there and kind enough to try my beer and give us a tour. He apparently like it, but felt that is was more of a southern english brown ale than a brown porter. It does seem to be missing some of that porter aromatic - fruitiness, so next time I will try brewing it with Nottingham dry yeast instead of US-05. I was aware of the difference between the 2 yeasts, but my intention was to make sure my first brewing of the beer didn't have too many esters. Anyway, this will be a good test to see the difference between the 2 yeasts.

After Tim took the time to taste and comment on my beer he started off our tour of the brewery - with some Flying Bison beers in hand. The brewery is open until 7 on Fridays and 10ish ounce beers are only $1.50. I started out with a "Rusty Chain" - described as a Vienna lager recipe brewed with an ale yeast and all continental hops. I rate it the best drinking beer I have had in quite awhile, and I may have to pick up a growler of it sometime soon. I also tried the Inferno Pod Ale, brewed for Pizza Plant in Williamsville. It was definitely bitter, full of hop flavor and aroma, and not too sweet or worty. I think it would go great with a pizza for sure.

The brewery tour was excellent, even though the brewery is in an old building and is not purpose built. It's the kind of brewery you would end up with if you started you own. It was a welcoming place for me as a homebrewer, and I even managed to get a few of my questions answered for some tips on brewing Skye Pilot Scotch Ale!

Making a 2 Degree Per Hour Mash Tun

My mashes are all over the place. I have been mashing in a 10 gallon rectangular cooler that I added a simple manifold to. I recently did a test that showed a 10 degree drop in temperature over 60 min. This is way too high, since I don't want to add hot water to adjust part way through.

I noticed when I did this test that the tun lid got quite warm. Upon further investigation, the lid is totally un-insulated.

My first inclination was to get some styrofoam, cut it to fit the inside of the lid, and then line it with plastic. Instead I used "Great Stuff", cut it down with a hand saw after it dried for weeks, and tried to seal some foil over the top with silicone.

This setup lowers my temperature drop to 2 degrees per hour, which amazes me and it's just what I want. However, don't do what I did. Just get a thick sheet of styrofoam and use 2 sided tape to attach it to the inside of the lid. Then cover that with heavy duty foil and possibly some more waterproof 2 sided urethane tape to hold it on.

I used white silicone that did not dry correctly, then covered it with packing tape. It's a hack job. Also, Great Stuff fumes a lot as it cures. So don't copy (exactly) what I did.

Brown Porter - Attempt 1

So my wife likes Porter, and I happen to be interested in finding a good recipe to ferment on Oak chips. So as I tend to do lately I found the correct episode of The Jamil Show (Brown Porter) to learn all about the style. I split the recipe in half so that I could brew it all-grain on my stove. (This is probably my last indoor batch for awhile since it takes so long to come to a boil inside). Here is the recipe I wrote down (and converted) listening to Jamil's show:

3 gallons of Brown Porter
OG 1.052
FG 1.013
27 IBU
24 SRM

4.75lb - 2 row Maris Otter
0.5lb - Brown Malt
0.5lb - Crystal 40L
0.25lb - Chocolate 350L
All mashed at 152F

1.25 ounces Fuggles 5%AA @ 60min
0.5 ounces Fuggles 5%AA @ 10min

Substitutions:
I made a few changes to this, I used East Kent Goldings with the same Alpha Acid content, but I don't remember why (0.66oz EKG @60min, 0.34oz EKG @10min). The effect of the chocolate malt was emphasized on this episode of the Jamil show, so I was careful to adjust the amount I used based on the degree lovibond. Mine was 450L rather than 350L, so I used 4oz rather than 5oz for the half batch. I also used US-05 dry yeast rather than an English strain to get a little bit cleaner beer. In the future I will probably re-brew this using Nottingham dry yeast and the amount of Fuggles hops actually called for. (Jamil knows what he is talking about - or so he says (post tasting note - Jamil knows what he is talking about)).

Process:

My mash tun for small batches is a bit sketchy, and I had trouble achieving and holding temperature. The 60 minute mash started at 156 and ended at 150 with some screwing around in the middle try to keep the temperature up. It bothers me that I don't have control over this part of my process and will be the next thing I fix.

I boiled this beer on the stovetop. It took a long time to get the nearly 4 gallon initial volume to a boil. The rest of the the boil went normally, and I took the pot outside to use my (way too short) counter flow chiller. After "chilling" the beer was still 80ish degrees, so pitching had to wait until the following morning. The dry yeast was rehydrated in a measuring cup with 90 degree water, as usual for me.

Brown Porter attempt #1 fermented in my basement between 65 and 68 degrees. After 2 weeks in the only fermenter I bottled the Porter with priming sugar calculated to 2.3 volumes. I no longer secondary any of my beer since listening to Jamil.

Results:

2.5 weeks after bottling and the beer is really good. Measured final gravity is 1.012. I had bought some Michelob Porter for my wife to try, and I prefer mine by a long shot. The Michelob version is not high on taste.

My Brown Porter is malt-focused in taste and aroma, with a full but not thick mouthfeel. I definitely like it. I think it's the best beer I've brewed so far and I am looking forward to brewing some more of Jamil's recipes!

Future Adjustments:

Next time I brew it I plan to hop exactly according to the recipe and I want to ferment the next batch on oak chips. I think it would also be good to bump up the gravity a bit.

10/1/09 Update:

Had one of the few remaining bottles of this batch. It now seems a bit drier and thinner, and the flavor is focused on the heavily roasted / burnt taste from the dark chocolate malt. I definitely want to use a lighter chocolate malt next time I brew this.