Smoked Porter Brewday

I have been studying for the Massachusetts bar exam for the last two months. Fortunately I have made it through the hazing ritual (whether or not successfully, I don't know) intact enough to spend the next few days relaxing and brewing beer.

I have attempted this recipe before but the resulting beer did not have any hint of the smokey flavor that it should have. It was chocolatey, coffee-like and roasty. It got a 35 in a local competition in the porter category. What most likely happened was that the local home brew store sold me the wrong grain. Instead of rauchmaltz I ended up with amber malt or something. This time I bought my grain from Brewmaster's Warehouse. The Brewbuilder feature of that store is pretty cool since it lets you build and buy your own recipes, each of which will come in its own sealed plastic bag. Anyway, I hope this attempt will yield a prominent smoked flavor like the Alaskan Smoked Porter. (The Stone Smoked Porter is good too but has only a subtle background of smoke, in my view.) The recipe comes from an old issue of BYO. You can easily find it on the interwebs.

Alaskan Smoked Porter Clone 
3.25 gallon batch

4# 8oz Briess 2-Row Brewers Malt
1# 10oz Briess Smoked Malt
1# Weyerman Pale Ale
0# 8oz Crisp Chocolate Malt
0# 6oz Briess Caramel 40L
0# 4oz Crisp Black Patent
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8# 4oz Total Grain

0.5oz Chinook, 13.9%AA, 60 min
0.5oz Willamette, 7.5% AA, 15 min

Safale US-05

Anticipated OG / FG: 1.063 / 1.017 (70% Mash efficiency)
Anticipated IBU: 51 (Tinseth)
Anticipated SRM: 45

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7/27/12
Dough-in with 2.58 gallons of 165F water. Wow, got a nice whiff of smokey almost bacon like smell. 10 minutes later the actual mash temp was 152F. A couple of degrees lower that target, but that will probably be OK.

Got my first runnings. Ended up with 2.8 gallons or so. I must have screwed up the measurements for the mash-out water volume because I was only supposed to get 1.88gal of 1st runnings. Crap! Added 2nd runnings water, reduced so that I hope to get only 3.75 gal of pre-boil wort. If more I can boil longer to reduce the volume of wort and hit the right OG.

Got about 4.3 gal of pre-boil wort - more than I calculated. Boiled for 90 minutes.

Put almost exactly 3 gallons into the 3-gal Better Bottle when the wort was around 85F. Let sit in 65F water to cool to pitching temps.

Did not take a gravity reading. That was dumb. Also some equipment issues because my wort chiller was leaking a bit at the intersection b/t the plastic tubing and the copper tubing.

Ack, a dog hair may have gotten into the fermenter! Or maybe it is a long string of coagulated trub protein.

Pitched around 11:15pm, when beer was at about 72F. Let sit in 65F water bath.

7/28/12, 4pm
Krausen is forming. May have to bust out the blow-off tube pretty soon.

7/29/12, 6:30pm
Very active fermentation with a think brown krausen. Surprisingly though it is not blowing an schmutz out of the airlock.

8/11/12
Bottled today with 2oz sugar. FG was 1.015. Got 28 bottles, plus about 14oz of beer left in the bucket / hydrometer sample. The uncarbonated beer tasted like a mix of chocolate, coffee and smoke. Tasting to come in a week or two.