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.