Hoppy Brewing

Well, the day is here and it is time to find out if I can make a decent all-grain beer! I have my grains all converted and it is time to sparge as we speak! First a bit of catch-up:

The Recipe:

11 ½ lbs. pale malt
1 lb crystal malt (60L)
3/4 lb. chocolate malt
1/3 lb. black patent malt
1 cup blackstrap molasses
½ tsp Irish Moss
Hops:
2 oz. hallertauer (whole) @ 60 min
½ oz. Cascade (whole) @ 10 min
Yeast:
American Ale Yeast (Dry)

Target gravity: 1.060
Target IBU’s: 36.2

Method:

Step Mash

50 min at 147° followed by 1 hr 50 min at 153°. My 147° was a little closer to 149°. 153° was right on. I got this schedule from the book The Brewer’s Companion by Randy Mosher. This book is a must have when you get to all-grain!

Sparge

5 gallons of sparge water at 180° for a total of 45 min of time. It actually was only about 25 minutes…I’ll have to work on that and see how big a deal timing is on that. The sparge arm worked like a champ though! I may have drilled too many/ too big holes.

Boil

90 min boil with the following additions:
2 oz hallertauer at 90 min
1/2 tsp irish moss at 15 minutes
0.5 oz cascade at 10 min
The new burner seems to work alright and it looks like it is boiling away happily although I cannot see the liquid because of all the steam because it is only 30° outside…

Whoops! I only ended up with 3.5 gallons of wort after the boil. I’ll have to devise a better way of working that out…I added tap water to bring it up to 5.5 gallons.

Icooled with the wort chiller to 75° in 17 minutes. I pitched the yeast and then cleaned up.

Well, that was quite the experience. It gives me a new appreciation for extract brewing – it’s much quicker, that’s for sure. But it was a good experience and the beer will be wonderful. It’s a good feeling to know I took grains and made beer all by myself.

03/16/08

Today I racked Clementine’s Porter. I sneaked a taste and was very pleased. It is very chocolatey with just a hint of molasses. Very good indeed. The SG was 1.011. I will bottle next weekend.

03/23/08

I’m bottling Clementine’s Porter today. I’ve decided to do 3 gallons with the normal proportion of dextrose sugar, but for the other 2 gallons I am priming with molasses (at the rate of 1 cup per 5 gallons). I’m only doing two gallons of the molasses-primed stuff because I think it may overpower the beer. But it may be perfect – who knows…