It’s been a while since I posted any brewing stuff, and since I brewed last night, I thought this would be a good opportunity.
First, I may as well mention the couple of batches that I did over the past couple of months but didn’t talk about at the time. The first was the Holiday Ale – which we called “Crooked Cat Tail Holiday Ale”. It was actually just the Brewer’s Best Holiday Ale kit. It turned out really good, and we gave some away to friends and family for the holidays.
Second was a coffee stout. This was my first attempt at a coffee stout. I used a recipe from the Brew Your Own “150 Classic Clone Recipes” special issue. I started with the Lagunitas Brewing Company Cappuccino Stout clone, but altered the malt extract quantities a little bit to suit my needs. The recipe called for quite a bit of specialty grains, and I ran into an issue because of this – all of the grains barely fit into my steeping bag, and some of the malts in the center of the bag didn’t get wet at all during the steeping. Also, I skipped the dry hopping that the recipe called for. These two things, I think, adversely affected the final outcome. I tried some the other day, and the coffee flavor is way to strong. I think if the grains had properly steeped, and I had done the dry hopping, the flavor would be better balanced.
Oh, well. Live and learn – it’s all part of the process. I’m going to let it age a few more weeks and try it again, to see if it mellows out at all.
On to the Porter!
I had some specialty grains and hops left over from the stout batch, so I threw together a porter recipe based on that. Since the Mystery Ale turned out to be one of my best batches, and that was just thrown together around left over ingredients, I figured “What the heck? Let’s go for it!”
So, this is the recipe I came up with:
Plain ol’ Porter
3 lbs. Amber DME
3 lbs. Amber LME – late addition
1 lb. Crystal 20L
1 lb. Black Patent
1/2 lb. Chocolate
1/2 oz Nugget 12.8% @ 60 min.
1/2 oz Cascade 6.9% @ 60 min.
1 oz Cascade 5.1 % @ 30 min.
.75 oz Willamette 3.8% @ 5 min.
1/4 tsp. yeast nutrient @ 15 min.
1084 Irish Ale yeast
I’m going to wait until after I taste it, but the name may change if it turns out to be really good. Maybe “Perfect Porter”!
