I have been looking at my Ron Pattinson Vintage Beer book lately, so felt inspired to brew an older style dark beer this time, so the recipe below is roughly based on the Whitbread 1880 Porter recipe.
I liked it's simple grain bill and the fact that it didn't use invert sugars like a lot of the other recipes, as I haven't tried making my own invert yet. I have used Mild Ale malt as the base malt, as I had it in stock and it was getting on a bit, even though it was all sealed up.
To my surprise, a lot of the porter recipe's from around this time seem to use American Cluster hops for bittering, so this is why I have used Columbus for that job (had them in stock again), and then my 30 minute addition of Progress is my gut feel addition for flavour, as i only do 60 minute boils and the recipes in the book are all at least 90 minute boils with what looks like a flavour addition at 60 minutes.
Things didn't go quite as smoothly as they did with the last 2 recent brews, but nothing disastrous.
I had finally used up my first bottle of CRS that came from my LHBS a while back, so I cracked open a new bottle of Malt Miller AMS that I had ready to use. This AMS seems to be almost double the strength of the CRS that I had been using, as my first dose took my Alkalinity below my target of approximately 125ppm CaC03 to 96.5ppm. So in a bid to get it somewhere near my target, I added 2L of untreated tap water back into my HLT and then re-tested the liquor with my Salifert kit and it came out at 116.5ppm, so I decided to settle with this. I will never know if the adjustments were worthwhile from a mash pH point of view, as I didn't order the new electrode for my pH meter in time for it to arrive for this brewday
.The other issue I had, was with a semi stuck mash whilst trying to drain the second batch sparge into my boiler. On closer inspection of my MT once the boil was underway, it seemed to point towards the black malt addition in the grain bill. In the past I have only ever used small amounts of black malt for colour adjustments. It looked like the really fine black dust from the black malt had got into the drain hole in the bottom of my MT and almost ruined the show!
And finally I didn't quite hit my numbers with this one, as I was aiming for 1.057 @ 20L, but I ended up with 1.060 @19.5L. I can put this down to two things - 1. I scaled back my brewhouse efficiency slightly to account for the Mild Malt from previous experience with it & 2. After setting the boil timer on my phone to 15mins after adding the Irish Moss, it became apparent that I hadn't actually started it, so it wasn't until I looked at the time on my watch while cleaning my MT, that I realised that I had been boiling for approximately 68 minutes
again!Apart from that, everything has been going to plan since, and I checked the gravity last night on day 7, and it was almost down to 1.018, so he's hoping that it doesn't actually drop much lower, as the sample from the trial jar (last picture below) was tasting rather good!
I am planning to bottle the whole brew, and will then leave to condition for at least 2 months. Below is the final recipe and a few brewday pic's.
AG#23 - 19th Century Porter
Robust Porter
Recipe Specs
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Batch Size (L): 19.5
Total Grain (kg): 5.238
Total Hops (g): 42.00
Original Gravity (OG): 1.060 (°P): 14.7
Final Gravity (FG): 1.015 (°P): 3.8
Alcohol by Volume (ABV): 5.89 %
Colour (SRM): 34.5 (EBC): 67.9
Bitterness (IBU): 36.8 (Tinseth)
Brewhouse Efficiency (%): 72
Boil Time (Minutes): 60
Grain Bill
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4.295 kg Mild Ale Malt (82%)
0.681 kg Brown Malt (13%)
0.262 kg Black Malt (5%)
Hop Bill
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12.0 g Columbus Leaf (16.8% Alpha) @ 60 Minutes (Boil) (0.6 g/L)
30.0 g Progress Leaf (6.4% Alpha) @ 30 Minutes (Boil) (1.5 g/L)
Misc Bill
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3.0 g Calcium Chloride @ 90 Minutes (Mash)
3.0 g Calcium Chloride @ 60 Minutes (Boil)
3.0 g Irish Moss @ 15 Minutes (Boil)
Single step Infusion at 67°C for 90 Minutes.
Fermented at 19°C with Safale S-04
Notes
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Total Liquor - 30L
Mash Liquor - 13.1L
Sparge Liquor - 16.9L
Salifert Test -
1 - 0.44ml = 3.08meq/L x 50 = 154ppm CaC03
2 - 0.64ml = 1.93meq/L x 50 = 96.5ppm CaC03
3 - 0.57ml = 2.33meq/L x 50 = 116.5ppm CaC03 (Added 2 L of tap water back to the HLT to raise the alkalinity)
Malt Miller AMS @0.16ml/L
Water Profile - Graham Wheelers Porter
Pre-Boil Gravity - 1.051 @25L (79% Mash Efficiency)
Recipe Generated with BrewMate
Cheers
MB
