Making home brew porter
Making home brew porter
Bought beer kit for “Robust Porter: a classic dark ale featuring chocolate and de-bittered black specialty grains. A nice hoppy character is balanced well against this roasty, full-bodied beer”
Following the directions, we sterilized out equipment (6.5 gallon carboy, spoon, hydrometer, siphon, etc)
We started 2.5 gallons of water to heat to 160 degrees. While doing that we put the grains into the steeping bag, made of cheese loth. Note for next time: do this process on a plate as some powders escape through the holes in the cheesecloth.
We put the LME (malt extract) in hot water to make it easier to pour. our it into the wort, and steep it for 40 minutes, keeping it at 160 degrees.
After steeping the grains and draining the bag, we added the malt extract, stirring constantly to keep it from burning on the bottom of the stock pot. Heat it up to a gentle rolling boil.
Once it was at a rolling boil, we add the bittering hops. Rolling boil for 30 minutes, then add the flavoring hops. 25 more minutes of rolling boil, then 5 minutes with aroma hops.
Once this is done, we must cool the wort down. There are several ways to do this, in our case we ran a cold water bath in the bathtub. A bin full of ice water might have been ,ore efficient. More efficient still would be to use a wort chiller.
Once the wort is reduced to room temperature, we transfer it to the fermenter, a 6.5 gallon carboy. The specific gravity should be 1.051 - 1.055 after adding water. As it turned out the amount of water I had was enough to have it at 1.051 the first time we tested.
At this point, it’s time to add the yeast and stir it in, capping it off with an airlock. 5-7 days from now, we’ll rack it, and a week or two after that will be time to bottle it.
This was my third time at making beer. I have much more experience at making mead and wine, which don’t have as much labor intensity at the beginning. For Jo, this was her first time doing this. Having an experienced chef do the time-intensive heating and stirring was a big plus - she knew what she was looking for with the simmering, holding temperature and watching the boil. For her, this was very similar to making a soup stock, and it was a fun and interesting process for her. Fr me, it was good to have someone with the patience to watch the brewing pot of grain, malt extract and herbs.
We will most likely go through this process a couple more times with a prepared kit to get the process down pat, and then we’ll be ready to strike out on our own making recipes from books or from the Internet. This is a cheaper way to make beer: the materials were about $45-50, and we should get the equivalent of 8-9 6 packs of beer at about $4 per six pack. Once we find some recipes we like, we will not be at the mercy of the liquor store to have a tasty brew at an inexpensive price.