Ol' Smokey

On Sunday I brewed a smoked porter with the idea of building a lot more smoke into it than #7, Djibouti Smoked Porter, had. To this end, I used about twice as much rauch malt and even threw in half a pound of super smoky peated malt to boost the flavor to new heights.

The Recipe:

5 lb 2-row pale malt
5 lb rauch malt
1 lb chocolate malt
8 oz peated malt

5 AAU (31g @ 4.5% AA) Willamette @ 60
4 AAU (25g @ 4.5% AA) Willamette @ 20

1 Irish Moss tablet @ 15 min

Wyeast 1728 - Scottish Ale

Mashed at 156° for an hour using about 13 quarts of water. Sparged with 165°+ water until I had about 26 quarts for the boil. This included a 4-quart mini-batch in the middle.

O.G.: 1.046
Est. IBU: 29.9

I only got about 60% efficiency on this batch, a fact which did not impress me. This was despite a bizarre experiment in which I took about 12 cups of the grist on a quick spin in the food processor to try to crack it down further. Perhaps next time I will run all the grain through this to boost efficiency a bit.

One interesting thing is that the batch did not smell super smoky. When I started the dough-in process, I got a big whiff of the peated malt; however, once the boil was on I pretty much lost all sense of the smoke. Perhaps it will be more noticeable once all the sweetness has been fermented out.

I used the Scottish Ale yeast for this recipe because I plan on using the yeast to make my next batch, which will be a Wee Heavy. That will require enough grain that I'll get to use my brand new mash tun... exciting!