london porter recipe?

[baskahalpa]

Hi the beerkit fellows,
Do any of you have a good, "easy", first porter brewing attempt recipe using London water?
I've had success brewing back home in South Africa, and now live here in London. Since moving to London my brews are not working, I'm used to brewing pilsners and lager style beers with our lovely soft waters, I'm now faced with either treating the water here, which I have no idea of how to, or I have to brew a London beer. I've never brewed a porter before and would love to try. So can you help me with a beginners porter recipe please?

[dave-o]

This was mine:

5kg Pale malt
500g Brown malt
500g wheat malt
300g Crystal

40g Challenger - full boil
30g Fuggles - 10 minutes

[coatesg]

London water is quite high in alkalinity - you need to reduce this in some way before brewing a pale beer (boiling, acid additions) so the mash pH is correct. There are guides on how to do this with CRS in the Liquor section of this forum.

For pilsners, all the dissolved minerals will make the water further from ideal (and you can't treat the water to remove these), at which point you can either go down the dilution with distilled water route, or buying bottled water like the ASDA smartprice water (13p/2L) which is pretty low in minerals as is.

[baskahalpa]

Thanks guys,
will try both.
I'll brew the porter and get some bottled water.
I'm keen to try the porter and i'm also keen to try and IPA, so i'm off to the beer shop to go get the grains today. looks like it'll be a busy weekend.

[coatesg]

For an IPA, you'd be OK in using CRS to treat the water (remember to use a campden tab to treat the chlorine) . If you use bottled water for an IPA, you'll need to whack in a good amount of salts to correct the mineral levels (usually gypsum for calcium and sulphates) - though you'd probably need to add a bit of calcium for a lager too. For ease of use, I'd reserve the bottled water for the lagers, and also, make sure you get the right brand - the ASDA one is good for lager making, others are no better than the stuff out of the taps. HTH!