I brewed up a couple new batches this weekend.  A dubbel and a coffee porter.  The dubbel was fairly straight forward, similar to my last dubbel all grain recipe.  I’m hope there are no severely off flavors for this one, we’ll see what happens.  The second, more interesting, batch I did was a coffee porter.  This one I have my doubts on.  1)  As usual, I’m a dumb shit and can’t read labels.  2) I was too lazy to go pick up some Kona coffee as I had hoped so used some old Starbucks Ethiopian Sidamo I had in the freezer.  I brewed up a pot prior to using and it seemed along the lines with what I was looking for.  I’ve read how some brewers cold brew the coffee and then add this to the boil.  Sounds complicated.  I just added a 1/4 lb of the ground coffee into the mash.  Let me tell you, that mash smelled goooooood……  Oh, onto how I probably screwed it up.  So I’m going off a couple of recipes I found and from my smoked porter recipe I did awhile back.  In my smoked porter, I used 1/4 of black malt so I decided to cut that back to 1/8 lb as it can bitter a beer quite severely if not used in moderation.  so I measured out the 1/8th lb, dumped it into my grain mill with the rest of my specialty grains.  I then got busy with something else and finally came back to add in my pale chocolate malt, 1/2 lb.  I did that, milled all the specialty grains and the bag aside as this would be batch #2 for the day.  About an hour later, I noticed my full 1 lb bag of pale chocolate malt sitting off to side…meaning I had over 1/2 of black malt ground up in my grain.  Yup, I’m a dumbass.  I carefully scooped out as much of the black malt I could from the grain, luckily it’s dark, the rest is not.  During the process I dumbed a bunch of my malted oats and crystal malt, so after adding in 1/2 lb of pale chocolate I made up for the crystal/caramel malt with 1/2 of the Special B I had left over from the dubbel.  This is going to be interesting…  When I tasted the wort through the process, I didn’t get an overwhelming sense of the black malt, but it usually doesn’t come out until after bottling and fermentation when the sugar has been converted and isn’t covering the bitterness.  Awesome, what can I say.

I also bottled up my Bay Ridge Beer de Garde and my Drunken Monk #2.  I took samples the day before an they both seem promising.  The biere de garde may have a little diactel  (sp?) to it, I’m hoping  it doesn’t get worse.