BamfBeer Blog

The original recipe was based on Papazian’s 5-gallon recipe for “Silver Dollar Porter”, modified for a 6.5 gallon batch size.

Here’s the *original* recipe and mash schedule for 6.5 gallons.
10.4 lb 2-row
1.3 lbs munich
0.65 lb crystal
0.65 lb black
0.65 lb chocolate
1.2 oz perle hops (60 minutes)
.5 oz cascade  (60 min)
.75 oz cascade (5 min)
20 minutes @ 122F, 20 minutes @ 150F, 20 minutes @ 158F, mash out @ 170F

Now, here are the actual amounts and times we used.

11lb two-row

1.5lb Munich

.75lb each of black patent, chocolate, and crystal 80L

.5oz Cascade and 1.2 oz Perle hops for 60 minutes

.75oz Cascade for 5 minutes.

Our mash schedule went to hell in a handbasket, unfortunately. Our initial strike temperature was supposed to be 122F. Using ~14lb of grain, we figured we should strike with 3.5 gallons at 135F. That part worked perfectly.

Next, we needed to get to 150F. Our calculations told us to add 3 gallons of water @ 212F (boiling). This only got us to 142. If someone can justify that using our numbers, send mail to bkjones ~at~ gmail. After adding something in the area of 4 gallons of boiling water, we got to 150F. This was a TON more water than we expected to add, and we were unsure what to do because we were supposed to also perform a starch conversion at 158F.

My notes contain a gap of about an hour at this point, probably due to slight panic setting in, and by the time I got back to my laptop we were boiliing. In the future, I think we’ve resolved to just direct-fire the mash tun, as I’m reading all over the place about brewers with setups identical to ours (round metal false bottom in a Sanke keg) that it works fine without scorching the mash.

Once we got to the boil, everything worked wonderfully. We hit an OG of 1.052 as it went into the fermenter on Sept. 16, and a FG reading today of 1.010. It tastes fantastic, and would appear to be already ready for bottling.

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The next batch will be brewed either the last weekend of September, or the first week in October. It’s going to be a robust or “sharp” porter, based on this recipe. The two cool things about this next batch are a) I have personally never brewed a porter (I believe Matt has), and b) we’re brewing a 10-gallon batch, assuming we can get a satisfactory repair done to our new water boiler.

The water boiler, as you might remember, sprung a leak during the brewing of our Hefeweizen. It wasn’t catastrophic or anything, and it should be simple enough to fix. With the fix in place, we have a three-keg brew system, which means we can boil more water and wort, and we can handle larger mashes. We also have a pump and wort chiller, which should make the whole operation not take forever, even for a larger batch.

It will also be less labor intensive than our old system, which relied upon the fact that from my back door, to my deck, to my driveway was three levels of gravity we could work with. Now picture us getting the boiling wort up to my back door (don’t open that!), running the hose for the (counterflow) wort chiller 10 feet, and running another 10 feet to get the wort to the fermenter. Ugh. Now we just have some tubing to hook up. It’s so easy that, coming from our last setup, it’s actually a little uncomfortable. We kept double checking to make sure everything was set up properly. It just seemed too good to be true.

Well, that’s all for now.

Wish us luck!

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So here are pics from our brew day last week.

Click on the pics to see descriptions and stuff - Enjoy!

http://flickr.com/photos/bkjones/sets/72157594275146311/

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So, as per our usual procedure, Matt put together the recipe for this one, and it looks really good. Also, the little bits of the wort we tasted as it was going into the fermentator were promising!

Here’s the all-grain, 6.5 gallon recipe, followed by a play-by-play of our brew day.
5lb American two-row pale malt

1lb German roasted wheat

8lb German wheat

1.75oz Hallertauer pellet hops

0.75oz Simcoe hops

German Wheat Yeast (smack pack)

The actual step-by-step instructions differ a bit (as you’ll see) with how our day went. Here’s the step-by-step:

mash in with 3.5 gallons @ 130F - rest for 30 min.

raise to 150 with 1.75 gallons @ 200F, rest for 30 min

raise to 158F with 3.5 gallons @ 200F, rest for 10 min.
approx 1.4 gallons will be absorbed by grains

sparge to collect 8.5 gallons.
So there’s the target step-by-step. But, as we all know, stuff happens when you’re homebrewing, decisions get made on-the-fly, new ideas are tested live, things go wrong, times draw out, and all that stuff. So here’s our actual play-by-play.
11:38am Strike 3.5 gal @ 130F
11:42 measured mash @ 122F. Perfect!
~11:56 added 1.8 gal @ 212F

11:59 measured mash @ 149F target is 152F. Turns out the formula we used to figure out how much water to add and at what temperature to get to our target was off. We used 130F as the starting temp instead of the 122F that was the actual starting point.
12:04 We put the mash tun on the burner after measuring mash @ 146.
12:13 took mash off burner reading 150F, put on lid. Hopefully thermometer reads ~152F in two mins.
12:15 reading ~148F.
12:16 put it back on the burner
12:19 took mash off burner, reading ~153.
12:26 mash measuring 153F
12:32 mash measuring 152F
12:51 mash measuring 152F
1:05  now heating water to 170F to sparge with. Mash tun and HLT in place. Since the pump is working well, we used it to recirculate the wort through the mash and set the grain bed. Worked like a charm!
1:52 sparging. Still got a couple gallons to go. Had a leak in the new water tank. Actually, I caused it. I stepped on a hose that was connected to the valve, and it pulled loose. Sparge arm is working well! Pump could probably use a little more downward push from the water tank, but all’s well.
If you’re thinking “Man, that’s a long ass rest at 152″, we thought that too. Then we figured “so what?”. We’ve never been all stressed about long mash rests. The red ale had a long rest too while we had to revert to an all-gravity system when our pump failed. That beer came out beautifully. During all this time, we actually converted a keg into a water boiler to replace the turkey fryer pot we used to use. It actually made things a whole lot easier, and we decided that it was worth the extra mash time. The leak was fixed a few minutes later, and we moved on.

2:08 …and the water tank sprung *another* leak, so we transfered the remaining sparge water (about 3 gallons) into our old 7gal water pot and we just now poured the rest of the water over the bed. Still running clear, and looks like we should be fine. The fittings on the water boiler didn’t get put together quite right because the hole we drilled for them was actually too small. There were about two threads that never came through the hole that we totally didn’t notice until the leak happened. It’ll be fixed for next time. No big deal.
2:11 started boiling the wort. Just now lit the burner. We drew off about 8.25/8.5 gallons of wort.
2:40 We have boiling wort! Added 1 oz 3.7% hellertauer. Almost boiled over before we even added the hops!
3:25 Added .5 oz hallertauer and .25oz 12% simco hops
3:35 added .5oz simco and .25oz hallertauer
3:40 pot is off the fire. Hooked the HLT up to the pump, then the out side of the pump to the wort chiller. We wanted to move the wort through the chiller faster this time, becase last time we just used gravity, and the wort actually got *too* cool! Moving the wort faster worked perfectly. A gravity reading on the out side of the wort chiller read 1.048.
By 4:00, the beer was happily fermenting in the basement.

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