Well, that was an interesting experiment. I wanted to try out a few things so rather than do a full batch I decided to do an all-grain 4 liter batch.
The experimentation part was to try carbonate additions to a dark beer to see if I could hit pH 5.2 and also to try out a porter recipe to see how it tastes before maybe adjusting it for a full size batch.
I did the mash on the stove - the first success was that the pH strips gave exactly 5.2 pH with a super dark porter - so my water treatment attempt seems good so far. The hard part was trying to keep the temperature on target - particularly, the temperature seemed to vary wildly around the different parts of the pan. From 70deg on the bottom to 62 on top - weird.
Anyway, the mash seemed to work. The iodine more or less didn't go black (hard to tell with such a dark beer).
The rest was easy enough - boil for an hour, cool in the sink and pitch 6g of an 11.5g S-04 pack (rehydrated) into the wort.
So, the waiting begins...
It's kind of cool to just make up a small batch to test, but on the other hand it's just as much work as a full batch - dunno how often I will do this.
AG #10 (sort of) - Ridiculous Robust Porter
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BarryNL
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MightyMouth
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BarryNL
Ugh - imagine bad meat and rotting veg!MightyMouth wrote:I seem to have missed this post, I am a big porter fan, let us know how it turns out.
Oh well, looks like I got my first infection. I guess that's the nature of the hobby - gotta expect one now and then. Hopefully it will be another 20 or more batches before I see another.
Actually, I think you could see it in the fermenter - instead of the usual thick layer of yeast at the bottom this one had white crap all through the beer and down the sides especially. Luckily my other brews look normal.
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steve_flack