Brew #4: Mountain Homebrew "robust porter"

[eldan]

"robust porter"
Originally uploaded by eldan Last night, Melinda and I brewed beer, for the first time this year. It makes me feel a lot more settled in the house, because this is one of the things we had totally put on hold while the move was "impending".

We made the robust porter that is Mountain Homebrew's recipe of the month. I've regretted not keeping notes from previous brews, so now seems like a good time to start.


Ingredients
Grains:

• 8oz Crystal 30-35L
• 8oz Special Roast
• 16oz Chocolate Malt
• 1oz Black Patent

All crushed for us by the store because we don't have the hardware to do that here yet.
Malt Extract: 6 lbs Amber liquid extract
Hops: 1oz Magnum
Yeast: Safale S-04 dry ale yeast
Extras: 1 tsp irish moss (to clarify)

Method

1. Boil two gallons of water, chill and pour into carboy (*)
2. Bring three gallons up to 150°F, keep that temperature and steep the grain for 20 minutes
3. Take the grain out and bring the liquid to the boil
4. Take off the heat [we've forgotten to do this before, and it does introduce a noticeable off flavour], stir in the liquid malt extract and put back on the boil
5. Add ½oz Magnum hops
6. After 30 minutes, add the other ½oz Magnum hops
7. After 40 minutes, add the irish moss
8. Take off the boil at 60 minutes
9. Cool in a sinkful of water. Actually, I drained and refilled the sink a few times because the brewpot takes up so much of the sink's volume that the water gets heated rather quickly - I think not doing this in the past was a mistake, because it's always taken aaaages to get the wort cool

(*) Note to anyone who doesn't beer but has read this far anyway: this is called a "partial boil", and it's done because we don't have a vessel large enough to boil the full 5 gallons + space for it not to boil over. Basically we make an over-concentrated wort and water it down with the plain water to end up with something that should be about right. It also helps with one other issue: reducing the number of times one of us has to carry 5 gallons of water around.

We had a significant boil over when first bringing the pot up to boiling, as a result of which I now know that getting burnt sugar off an electric stove top is a pain in the arse. Apart from that (which I blame on it being an electric stove - we're both used to gas, and forgot that the ring would continue to give off heat after we switched it off), this brew seemed to go well. It was the first one for which there weren't any last-minute "oh shit we need to sanitise X" moments or anything like that, and it was also the first time that we saw fermentation start within 12 hours. I'm definitely inclined to use dry yeast again for this reason alone - I'm sure when previous brews have taken a day or two (or in one case a second addition of yeast) to get started that's allowed some unwanted microorganisms to get a toehold.

I don't know exactly how long it took to get started, because it happened overnight, but after 8 hours the fermentation lock was bubbling every 4-5 seconds, and after 15 hours it was going at least once per second.

The recipe says to give it 7-14 days in the fermenter, but we'll probably give it 3 weeks, and then another 3 in bottles. For our last batch (a scotch ale recipe from the same place) we followed the timings exactly, and it didn't come out all that well. 2 weeks after bottling the beer was almost bad enough for us to throw it away, but it improved somewhat over time. Still, the best it got had the same slightly sweet insipid quality that a lot of Vancouver's beer suffers from, and when a rather more experienced brewer tasted some he put this down to having bottled it too soon. So we're going to follow his advice and just give everything longer before moving it.

I am looking forward to tasting the outcome, because this is the first brew we've done that's really worked out as everything said it should without any major errors along the way.