Background

I had recently made a very good porter using someone else's recipe (see BirthdayPorter). I really enjoy this style and wanted to develop my own recipe. I drew on the book Classic Beer Style Series - Porter for inspiration.

Malts

1.057 original gravity. I don't have notes on the final gravity, Promash expects it to be 1.012. I think I ended up at about 1.015 from memory.

This was brewed using standard extract + grains techniques. I used hop bags to hold the grains at about 150 degrees for 30 minutes in the wort water before adding LME and bringing the wort to a boil.

Hops

59 IBU (according to Promash)

Yeast

I used a blend of yeasts. The stronger yeast was WYeast 1332, and I pitched from a starter (using the instructions given on a WYeast tube). I also had some WYeast 1084 that was 6 months old and never used, so I threw it in.

I aerated using a hand mixer after chilling.

Batch Two

I made this again on 10/31/2004.

Same recipe as above. The original gravity was 1.056 (1.019 for the grains alone). I used a 600ml starter of WYeast 1339 and heavily aerated.

One new thing that I tried today was doing a mini-mash in a pot in the oven. I used an 8qt pasta insert which maxed out with the 4lbs of grain. I used the batch sparging technique. The setup worked pretty well, but required an extra kettle over my normal system of using a grain bag.

alex

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