Broadford Aire Porter

Grist:
Maris Otter Pale Malt - 76.1%
Brown Malt - 8.4%
Crystal Malt - 7.9%
Black Malt - 3.8%
Flaked Oats - 3.8%

Hops:
Galena 10g – 12.0% @90mins
Galena 10g – 12.0% @30mins
First Gold 10g – 7.8% @10mins
First Gold 40g – 7.8% @0mins (steep 20 mins)

Final Volume: 19 Litres

Original Gravity: 1.044
Final Gravity: 1.011
Alcohol Content: 4.2% ABV
Bitterness: 31.4 IBU
Colour: 28.9 SRM
Yeast: Safale US-05
Mash: 90mins @ 66c
Boil: 90mins
Water treatment: In the HLT 1 camden tablet. In the mash 3.4g gypsum.  In the boil 4.4g gypsum, 3.8g epsom salts. 
As with most brew days, there is at least one thing that will go wrong, in this instance it was the last minute realisation that either I made a mistake on my order and ending up with Flaked Barley rather than Flaked Oats. 

Moving on from this minor glitch I used what I turned the HLT on and weighed my malts out.  The mash was the next thing to go slightly wayward, when you have your 4 year old being helpful and when you are trying to help cook the dinner and get the kids to bed, things tend to slip.  I had the HLT to strike temp of 78C and added a kettle of boiling water to the mash tun to pre-heat it.  Time passed. I came to mash in, but forget to re-heat the tun, this meant that I had to mess around to get the mash temp to my target 66C.

Mashing out, HLT temp set to 78C again and a quick temperature check on the tun told me that something had gone wrong.  It was 62C, I usually only lose a degree over 90 mins.  Carried on with the brew, batch sparging.  I usually try to take hydrometer readings throughout the mash, but decided to try to do this by tasting the wort.  This worked in that I got some experience of this method.  I stopped sparging with 3L water left in the HLT.  Got the boil on, 90 minute boil with the additions detailed above.  FOr my 19L brew length I collected 13.6L at around 1.058 (temp corrected).  I decided to liquor back and added 5L boiled/treated liquor. giving me a final volume of 18.6L at OG of 1.044.  Pitched the US-05 yeast when the temp hit 23C Happy with this, but there are some learning points:

• Check your ingredients well before your brewday.
• Always pre-heat mash tun with boiling water.
• When the mash tun is half empty, correct the strike temp? or at least give the tun some external insulation.
• When sparging, use the calculated liquor volume to avoid having to liquor back so much.

You can see the rest of the pics here.

Looking forward to the next Leeds Homebrew meeting 12th January 2012.

Contributor: David Bishop (@broadfordbrewer)

Smoked Oatmeal Porter

Grain Bill
% KG MALT OR FERMENTABLE
71% 4.600 American Two-row Pale
8% 0.520 Oats, Flaked
7% 0.450 Chocolate Malt
6% 0.380 Crystal 60L
5% 0.350 Amber Malt
2% 0.100 Smoked Malt
2% 0.100 Carafa III
80 EBC (black)

Hop Schedule
60 mins 50g mystery unlabelled (Chinook?) leaf hops 13%AA (estimated
FO 15g Centennial & Goldings mixed (15 min steep)
50 IBU

Gravities (estimated)
OG 1.080
FG 1.020 (predicted)
7.5%abv (predicted)

Fermented with US-05.

This was a total cock-up of a brew from start to finish.

The recipe was dictated by what I had left over, so while the grain bill looks carefully designed, it's basically what was left in various bags, although the smoked malt was donated by Dean - I didn't want to go overboard with it, as too smoky is worse than not smoky enough (in my book). The hops were definitely high-%AA American, judging by the price sticker - the name label had gone missing, sadly.

The boiler I was using kept cutting out before it got to the boil (sorry Tom), and so I had to split the batch between 3 saucepans on the stove, and divide the hops between them. I had to transfer the hot wort to the fermenter and chill it, rather than chill in the copper, which wasn't really a problem, although my 'hop filter' turned out to be a slotted spoon holding back the hops and hot break. Was too focussed on getting things right to remember to take gravity readings.

A niggly brewday that was very challenging, although quite rewarding given the problems that had to be overcome. I'm interested to see what US-05 will do to such a low-hop, malt-heavy beer.