For our next batch…
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!