Smoke Porter - Partial Mash
After looking around the net for a smoked porter recipe, I came across a partial mash recipe that looked doable for me. As a small apartment dweller, my brewing has thus far stuck with extract brewing as I simple do not have the space for all grain brewing. After reading a bit on partial mash, it looks like I have the gear to do it. I thought this recipe looked like a good brew and the instructions seemed within my limits.
I took the recipe from here . I also read more about partial mash brewing here.
While I stuck to main recipe as much as possible, I made a few changes:
2 lb Weyerman Smoked malt
1/2 lb L Briess Chocolate malt
1/2 lb L Briess Caramel Malt
1/4 lb L Briess Black Malt
1/2 lb L Castle Biscuit Malt
Malt Extract:
3.3 lbs Breiss Light Unhopped Liquid Malt Extract
3.3 lbs John Bull Amber Extract
Hops:
1 oz Willamette 4.5% leaf hops
2 oz Centennial Pellet hops
1 oz Irish Moss
Yeast:
Wyeast London Ale Yeast
The brewing actually began two days before when I, again, attempted to make a starter wort for the yeast. As I’ve learned my lesson on this, I made sure to purchase both the Wyeast starter yeast plus another White Labs pitchable tube should the starter wort not work out. This time it actually did work for me. I boiled up a liter of water with about 4 oz of light dme. Once boiled, I added this to my starter flask and placed in the fridge to cool it down. After a couple of hours, I the starter flask out of the fridge, let it stand at room temperature for about an hour after which is was about 72 deg. I added the smack pack that i had broken the inner seal on about 4 hours previous and let the flask sit. Sure enough, the next morning I had nice fermentation so hopefully everything works out well, we’ll see.
So for the brewing, I first gather my pots.
My 4 gal brewpot, my 2 1/2 gal bewbot and a saucepan for the spare water. I started by bringing the “mash tun” brewpot, 2 1/2 gal, with just under 2 gal of water up to about 180 deg. The recipe calls for a mash in at 154 deg for 60 minutes. I made a guesstimate of 180 deg with the hot liqueur to bring the grain/hot mash to 154. I was close, after adding all of the grains the temp was about 160 deg.
Over the next hour I checked every 15 minutes or so and after 30 minutes I ended up adding 2 quarts of almost boiling water to bring the temp back up to 154. I realized afterwards that I didn’t adjust my hot liqueur amount to the additional grains I used, I should of had the extra 2 quarts to begin with.
My next step was to strain the mash into the brewpot. I devised an overly ghetto method consisting of my brewpot, a colander covered with two extra large muslin bags, and a wooden spoon adjustment to the brewpot so it would hold the colander.
I quickly found out that the volume of grain I had would not all fit in the colander so I had to do a two step process. I added the first half of the grains to colander, pressed out as much of the wort possible and then ran the 180 deg sparge water over the grains, followed with another pressing of the grains to get all of the liquid out possible.
I followed the same procedure for the second batch of grains and then disposed of all of the spent grain and washed up the brewpot and colander. I then turned the heat on the main brewpot to bring the temperature up as my small stove needs time to bring the temperature up. In the meantime, I heated up some water in the other brewpot so I could add the malt extract to heat it up.
When that was done, I turned off the heat on the wort brewpot, add the malt extract and brought it up to a boil.
The rest of the boil went as follows: Centennial hops for 60 minutes:
Irish moss for 15 minutes and finally the Willemette whole hops for 15 minutes
From there I strained the wort into a fermenter bucket with 3 1/2 gallons of ice cold (not with ice, just ice cold) spring water. I aerated the wort by mixing it up with my sanitized spoon, added the yeast and took a gravity reading, 1.048.
Overall, my first try at partial mash brewing went well. While the proof will be in the final brew, I’m confident this will turn out well.