Smoked Porter #3

I've brewed three attempts at smoked porter before. Neither of them came out as smoky as I would like. In fact in both the smoke was a subtle background flavor, if noticeable at all. Why that was I'm not sure, but I would guess that it may have been inadequate percentage of smoked malt, older malt whose smoke flavor had faded, or a combination of both. In any case, I hope that this one will have a more prominent smoky flavor. The recipe is from Brewing Classic Styles with scaling to 3 gallons, substitution of US 2-Row for British malt, an increase in percentage of smoked malt, and Briess cherry-smoked malt instead of beechwood.

Smoked Porter #3

After racking onto a yeast cake.

5.125# US 2-Row
2.5# Cherry smoked malt
12oz Munich
10oz Crystal 40
10oz Crystal 80
8oz Chocolate
4oz Black patent

1oz Kent  Goldings, 5.4%AA, 60 min
.5oz  Willamette, 5%AA, 35min
.5oz Kent Goldings, 5.4%AA, 15min
.5oz Kent Goldings, 5.4% AA,  0min
.5oz Willamette, 5%AA, 0min

Danstar Dry-97 yeast

Mash at 154F for 75 minutes

Water treatment: Brookline, MA water with 1/4 tsp  each of gypsum and calcium chloride

Brewed 9/23/13

Hit my mash temps pretty much dead on. Yay!

Got 1.8 gal first runnings and 3.9 gal total after the sparge.

Preboil OG was  1.058. Too low efficiency. I gotta do something  about this.

About 3 gallons of  beer  when racked  into the fermenter. Yeast cake from the  IPA was still at the bottom of the 5 gal better bottle. It looked pretty nasty but apparently this is a good way to get a strong fermentation started early.

On 9/23/13 at 5:30pm the Better  bottle  was sitting  in 66F water and the airlock was slowly bubbling. A nice krausen had formed but it did not seem to be at high krausen yet.

10/8/13 - Bottled with 2oz brown sugar, going for 2.15 volumes of CO2. Almost exactly 3 gallons were in the bottling bucket. About 12oz were left over in the bottling bucket afterwards. I was under some time pressure this evening and didn't take a hydrometer sample.