Strong, Mostly Grain Porter

I am a big fan of Porter.  My previous batch of The President's Porter came out well.  I decided that I would make a regular Porter.  I am interested in moving into all-grain brewing, but I also had some malt extract from an old brewing kit that I wanted to use.  So I decided to make a mostly all-grain porter with the exception that  I would use up the remainder of the extract I had.  I adjusted the amount of grains I used using the an extract to grain conversion.

Ingredients

• 19.4 oz blonde malt extract from an old brewing kit (I thought I'd use it up.)
• 7 lbs cracked American 2-row (Klages) malt
• 1 lbs cracked Munich malt
• 1 lbs cracked crystal malt 120
• 1/2 lbs cracked black patent malt
• 1/2 lbs cracked English chocolate malt
• 1/2 lbs cracked, roasted barley
• 1 oz German northern brewer hops
• 1 oz German Tettnang hops 
• 3/4 cup dextrose
• 0.388 oz. Nottingham Dry Yeast
• 2.5 tsp diammonium phosphate
• 1 tsp Crosby & Baker yeast energizer
• 2 tsp gypsum
• 5-6 gallons Reverse Osmosis purified water
• 27 lbs ice

Sparkling Ginger Mead

In my last blog post, The President's Porter, I wrote about making a variant on the Whitehouse's Honey Porter. That made me think about using honey as the sugar for fermentation, which naturally led me to think about making mead.

The principal sugar used in making beer is maltose, a dissacharide made from two units of glucose. The sugar in honey, by contrast, is principally invert sugar.  Invert sugar is a mixture of  the simple sugars fructose and glucose. Fructose and glucose can also form a dissacharide called sucrose, cane sugar. The reason invert sugar has its name is that a mixture of fructose and glucose rotates plane-polarized light in the opposite direction from sucrose.

Invert sugar is very sweet and honey makes an excellent starting material for mead, a honey wine.

The President's Porter

In a previous post, I described the last batch of beer I made. It's time to start a new batch. As the Whitehouse recently released their recipe for a honey porter, I thought I start there. I also changed some of my methodology to correct some of the problems I encountered in my last batch.

The recipe I used is based upon the Whitehouse recipe. My local brew store was out of Nottingham yeast; so I am used Windsor yeast. I used a local organic honey instead of Whitehouse honey. I used 9.6 HBU of bittering hops instead og 10 HBU, and 1 oz. or aromatic hops instead of 1/2 oz., because the quantities are more convenient, and a little more aromatic hops never hurt anyone. I  used diammonium phosphate as a yeast nutrient, and gypsum for flavor. Also, I will use a process that is somewhat modified from the Whitehouse process that I will describe here. 

Amateur Summer Amber

I've brewed beer a few times, but I have not done so in quite some time. In the past, I have not kept very detailed notes about the beer I've made. This time I decided to do so, and as long as I was keeping notes, I thought it would be fun to blog about it.

I am far from an expert when it comes to brewing; so I decided to keep it simple by brewing a pure extract beer. I did create my own recipe, but it is very similar to recipes in a couple of my references below.