Another Success?

A busy weekend, so I didn't end up brewing anything. I learned, however, that my brewing buddy Cole has a wort chiller, so he will be brewing with me this coming Saturday. I did run by the homebrew store and pick up my grain and yeast for Mulligan ESB, so I will be red to go come Saturday.

Saturday morning I labeled the outside of my bottling bucket with a 1-gallon scale so that I can have at least a rough idea of how much I am bottling. I bottled #3 (Seven-Eleven Porter) and ended up with about 4.2 gallons altogether, which filled exactly 25 22oz bomber bottles. The taste was pretty good and had de-tarted a bit from when I racked it the previous week, so hopefully in a week or two I'll have another decent porter.

#2, Blackacre Butte, is getting pretty good reviews. I am very happy with how well it has been received all around.

I also racked #4, Foam Dome Stout, into the secondary. It actually tasted pretty good and stout-like; I'm optimistic about this one too. I have finally caught wise to the temperature effect on the hydrometer, so I am cooling any sample I take to 60° in the fridge before taking a reading. Doing this, my (mostly) final gravity was 1.009, with an estimated adjusted OG of 1.051 (original reading was 1.049 at about 75°), giving me about 5.5% ABV.

My biggest worry now is the temperature in the house, which will be getting into the nineties for the next week and a half, at least. I'm guessing this just means my beers will be a little fruity ... we'll just have to wait and see.

Prime Time

This is a handy little calculator for figuring out how much priming sugar to use when bottling. I have been a little bit one-size-fits-all about this process (used 3/4 cup corn sugar both times) and would like to refine it a bit.

Seriously, I slay myself sometimes.

Priming Calculator

Efficiency

One thing I have not been doing is sampling the gravity of my wort after the mash, but before the boil. This statistic will allow me to compute my approximate mash efficiency. This value may not actually help me improve my efficiency, but it will be another number of which to keep track, and you know how I love numbers.

Some sample malt potentials

I have calculated some extremely rough efficiencies of my previous mashes based on an estimation of how much evaporation occurred during the boil:

#2 - 11.7lb, est. post-mash gravity of 1.042 - 60% eff
#3 - 10.3lb, est. post-mash gravity of 1.039 - 67% eff
#4 - 10lb, est. post-mash gravity of 1.041 - 68% eff

I don't want to rely too much on these because my estimates could be off significantly; however, they do provide a ballpark range and would seem to indicate that my experience is paying off.

As a humorous aside, applying the calculation to my extremely botched first batch gives me about 38% efficiency.

Foam Dome Stout

I just brewed up batch #4 and things went mostly very smoothly. The sparge was notably slow, about 1 hr 10 min, perhaps due to the flaked barley.

The Recipe:
7 lb 2-row pale malt
2 lb flaked barley
1 lb black barley

11.25 AAU (64g @ 4.9% AA) Yakima Kent Golding hops @ 60 min

1 Irish Moss tablet @ 15 min

Wyeast 1084 - Irish Ale

Single infusion mash for 60 mins at about 154° using 13-14 qts and sparged with ~165-172° water until I had about 25 qts for the boil.

OG: 1.049
Est. IBU: 51.9

The only real problem I had other than the slow sparge was getting the mash to the correct temperature. I think I hadn't heated my water hot enough for dough-in (I was impatient and jumped the gun at around 165-168° or so instead of waiting to get it up over 170°), so there was a lot of futzing around to get it up to temperature. I also had a difficult time this week getting consistent temperature measurements in the mash -- whenever I moved the thermometer, I'd get something several degrees off.

The name of this batch is due to a volcanic eruption of foam when I poured the wort into the primary fermenter carboy. I had oxygenated about a quarter of it by vigorous shaking in the carboy which generated quite a lot of foam which I then underestimated when adding the rest of the wort. I wonder if it was due to extra proteins or something? My previous batches had relatively little foam.

Preparing to Branch Out

Today I went and got ingredients to do a dry Irish stout, marking my first branch from the porter style. It may end up being not so dry after all, as I upped the 2-row pale a little bit from the base recipe because I didn't want to make another three-two beer. The original recipe only had 5 lbs of 2-row pale so I threw in 2 more to make sure my gravity gets up over 1.040. I'm gonna try to brew tomorrow morning.

I racked #3, Seven-Eleven Porter, and got a likely final gravity reading of 1.010, so it's relatively sweet and clocks in at about 4.7% ABV. It's a little tart at this point, but it's got a pretty prominent coffee aftertaste which I really like, so hopefully after a week in the secondary and a week or two in the bottle it will be A-OK.

I also just cracked open my first bottle of #2. This was the half-bottle of the 21.5 bombers I bottled last week. It actually tastes more or less like #1 except less watered down -- pretty much just what I'd expected. It has a pretty prominent caramel flavor and I'd say another week will do it wonders.

Busy Brew Day

I engaged in brewing or brewing-related activities for nearly 9 hours yesterday, and it seriously wiped me out. Should a hobby be more work than your actual work?

Anyway, first I washed a bunch of bottles and bottled Blackacre Butte #2. The sample I tasted was pretty good, and I think the secondary helped it clear up a little. I only got 21.5 22oz bombers out of the batch, so I'm losing a pretty significant angel's share somewhere (5 gal = 640 oz, and I filled 473 oz-worth of bottles). Anyway, I'm saving my last Blackacre Butte #1 so I can do a side-by-side comparison at some point.

Speaking of #1, I've now consumed or given away 20 of the 21 bottles I had. The carbonation was highly inconsistent - some bottles entirely flat, some near exploding and some carbonated just right. I tried to make sure to stir in my bottling primer* a little more thoroughly when I bottled #2.

* 3/4 cup corn sugar disolved in about a pint of boiling water

The Main Event

The Recipe:
8 lb 2-row pale malt
12 oz crystal 90°L
8 oz black patent malt
9 oz black barley
8 oz chocolate malt

7 AAU (16g @ 12.5% AA) Galena hops @ 60 min
3 AAU (21g @ 4% AA) Fuggles hops @ 20 min
3 AAU (21g @ 4% AA) Fuggles hops @ 5 min

1 Irish Moss tablet @ 15 min

Wyeast 1028 - London Ale

Single infusion mash for 60 mins at 156° using about 11 qts and sparged with ~172° water until I had about 26 qts for the boil.

OG: 1.046
Est. IBU: 42.4

In honor of the brewing date, I think I'll call this one Seven-Eleven Porter. As you can see from the use of the darker crystal malt and the 1.5 lbs of extremely dark malts I was going for a much darker, thicker beer than last time. Cutting back the pale malt from 10lbs to 8 and mashing at 156° left me with a slightly lower OG so I expect the alcohol on this one to be in the 4.6-4.8% range, but the body should be a lot thicker and have a lot more character than Blackacre Butte. A taste of the wort had quite a prominent hop aroma and was very sweet with a lot of interesting flavors.

As before, the new mash/lauter tun worked like a champ and only dropped about half a degree during the hour mash. The only real problem I had with this brewing session came right at the end when I went to pitch the yeast. I'm using the Wyeast Activator line, which has a little nutrient pouch inside which you can smack to get the yeast rolling before you inoculate the wort. This time, I apparently failed to sufficiently break the pouch, so I just cut it open and poured it in along with the yeast. Hopefully this won't be a problem.

Much Better

I racked Blackacre Butte #2 two days ago and things are much more promising than #1. The smell and taste were quite good, much fuller than #1 and, more importantly, the alcohol percentage came out to a much more reasonable 5.6% (OG 1.050; FG 1.008).

I went to my LHBS and picked up grain, yeast and hops for #3 but did not end up brewing it after all, as I forgot to get a second airlock (the secondary for #2 is using my only one right now). Since brewing takes 5 or 6 hours, I may just wait until the weekend before I brew again. D'oh. Actually, I'll probably just bottle #2 this weekend and get a second airlock the next time I go get ingredients. At some point I want to have a couple batches going at all times; that will be nice.

Some Results

I have tasted Blackacre Butte #1, and all in all am quite satisfied with the results. Others who have tasted it have said it wasn't too bad either. The flavor is good, but it does seem a tiny bit watered-down, which is about what I expected.

One thing I did not expect was the level of carbonation the beer attained. My guess on this is that since there was less total beer than normal, I may have used a bit more bottling sugar than necessary. I'll follow the same recipe again for #2, and we'll see if the carbonation is equally berzerk.

I'm thinking I'll rack Blackacre Butte #2 tomorrow and brew up experimental porter #3 on Saturday. I haven't bought the ingredients yet, but I think I am going to go a lot heavier on the darker specialty malts and then mash at a slightly higher temperature to get a fuller body; say, 156°.