BBX Porter - 18/04/09

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Just heating up the water for this brew with an aim to mashing while I pop out this morning - it's been a good month since I've had anything fermenting So today I'm gonna use up some old hops in a porter - "Brown Bramling X" Porter. Recipe based on Jamil Z's brown porter:

3.9kg Pale
500g Munich
500g Brown
500g Crystal
280g Chocolate

Bramling Cross 60g 90min
Bramling Cross 15g 15min

Yeast will be S-04.

The hops are pretty old but have been sitting in the freezer for ages - so I'm taking a bit of a rough guess at how bitter it will turn out (aiming for somewhere like 27IBU but that's a bit of a pot shot give the age of the hops (originally 5.4%AA I think - I may well add a little fresh Fuggles for bittering too in case they are more knackered than I thought!)

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Had a bit of a shocker with this one and no idea how it's gonna turn out.

After the mash I put the wort in the boiler and found it was taking forever to come to the boil - turned out one of the elements had gone. So eventually had it boiling for about 45minutes, and then the remaining element broke too. So, I put the boiler on the hob and tried to bring it back to the boil but it just wouldn't get there - sat at about 95C and no higher. So I whacked in the second load of hops and let it simmer for about 15 minutes before allowing it to cool off.

Then, I found the immersion heater I use with the ATC800 controller has also smashed, so everything really got a bit naffed up.

Cooled it and pitched - landed with about 28L at 1051 (quite high efficiency for me but not reduced down as much as planned so had to run a bit into a half-demijohn) - though I have no idea if the boil was long enough, if it will have enough bitterness, and if it doesn't get infected it'll be a minor miracle as my sanitisation was a little lacking in amongst all the faffing around.

So all in all, a right screw-up.

Hopes aren't high!

Need to get a couple of new kettle from Tesco too now - and they were out of stock yesterday evening! Grrr!!!!

[coatesg]

Sounds like you had a trying brew day there...chances is are it'll be your best one yet

It'll be typical wouldn't it! Trying to reproduce it later will be a tricky one ho hum - it'll be beer of some sort no matter what

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Racked this over to another FV tonight as I needed to get the Hefe in the fridge. Tastes amazing, beautiful malt roast profile and I think this will be an unlikely success (I must buy some more brown and chocolate!!!). Though it's not done yet. Currently at 1021 (so only 3.8%) - hoping it'll go down to about 1.012-1.016 (4.5%-5%) just to dry it out a touch (I made sure I carried across a good bit of yeast from the FV and added a pinch of yeast-vit too get it back going again - I'll give it another 2 weeks in secondary to finish up before bottling).

After the trauma, this could work out pretty well - even if it only gets to 4%!

[coatesg]

After much persuading, I got this down to about 1016 before bottling so 4.5%. First tastes are very promising - full malt flavour, lovely coffee and chocolate flavours going on. Needs a few weeks just to mellow a bit I think. A bit better than first expected