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AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 1:41 pm
by WishboneBrewery
Imperial Smoked Porter - This is serving a couple of purposes; First is a Trial run of a big beer in my newly finished False bottom Mash tun; Second is using up some odd bags of malt and some older hops I had in the freezer and some other part bags of hops.
I'm not expecting the stated bitterness from my hops - http://www.wellhopped.co.uk/Product.htm so I'm going semi-worst case scenario and adjusting AA for age and storage.

Fermentables:
Pale Malt - 70.2%
Caramalt - 8.2%
Peat Smoked Malt, medium - 4.2%
Amber Malt - 3.9%
Oat Malt - 3.5%
Chocolate Malt, Pale - 2.3%
Crystal Wheat Malt - 2.4%
Chocolate Wheat Malt - 1.8%
Flaked Wheat - 1.6%
Chocolate Malt - 1.5%
Flaked Rye 0 EBC - 0.5%

Hops:
Bobek - 3.7 % @ 75 mins - 124g (FWH)
Admiral - 12 % @ 75 mins - 19g (FWH)
Herkules - 15.8 % @ 75 mins - 35g (FWH)
Brewers Gold - 9.1 % @ 10 mins - 68g
Cascade - 5.5 % @ 0 mins - 29g (Flame-out Steep for 20mins)
Saaz - 3.8 % @ 0 mins - 33g (Flame-out Steep for 20mins)
Simcoe - 12.9 % @ 0 mins - 20g (Flame-out Steep for 20mins)

Final Volume: 23 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.076
Final Gravity: 1.021
Alcohol Content: 7.2% ABV
Total Liquor: 36.8 Litres
Mash Liquor: 20.5 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 70 % (I collected 32L @ 1055 so hit efficiency but had too much liquor)
Bitterness: 121 EBU (I'm not expecting this as the bittering hops were fairly old so subtracting 30% from the AA will be more like 90EBU)
Colour: 140 EBC
Mashed for 90mins @ 66c
Boil for 75mins
Liquor treatment as per GW calc for General Purpose

Bigger bucket than normal with 8.5kg of malts:
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New mash tun full of hot liquor:
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Initial Mash a little high, cooled with cold liquor to 66c:
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Tidy brewsheet (version 3, other two are scibbly works in progress) along with late hops:
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Quite a heap of first Wort Hops in the copper along with the common salt addition:
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What lies beneath, mash leftovers under the mash screen:
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10 min hops going in:
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Break material clumping in the copper:
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Looks near as damn it to me (Showing 72 +2 divisions in the meniscus = 1076), not bad for a first outing of the new Mash Tun:
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I had 3.7 Litres in the new mash tun to just cover the false bottom, the first sparge top-up was a little over 3 litres so I didn't top-up and subtracted the difference from the Second batch sparge. This was to take into account the liquor under the screen, I ended up with 32 Litres in the copper which i thought too much but by the end of the 75min boil I was at my predicted gravity so I must have worked things out right!

Thoughts on the False bottom:
The mash ran off very well and after a few jugs of recirculating it was also very clear.
After stirring the second sparge and running off I came back to the mash tun to find it had run a load of malt particles into the copper as the last of the mash drained out. I'll have to keep an eye on it next time to stop this just as it starts to show bits coming through, or have a go a Fly sparging so as to not actually disturb the Mash bed and hopefully limit the amount of malt particles coming through.
New cleaning game, poking bits of malt out of the perforated stainless!

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter

Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 2:24 pm
by onelegout
Sounds tasty! I've never brewed with peat smoked malt before, but recently tried a rauchbier and loved it! How hard do you think it would be to home smoke some malt?

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter

Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 2:36 pm
by WishboneBrewery
Apparently you can do it in a BBQ, though i've never done it.

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter

Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 3:35 pm
by WishboneBrewery
Little Flame-out hopping vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Brbb817-pc

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter

Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 4:18 pm
by Kev888
Didn't realise you were Australian :-)

All sounds very nice, I've not used smoked malt - yet something else to go on the 'to try' list!

Cheers
kev

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 9:16 am
by WishboneBrewery
Fermenting well this morning on 2 Packets of S-04 :)

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 4:59 pm
by Fallen
Funny, just spotted this post. I've been rattling on about doing something similar with leftovers! Looking good 8)

Did a 'normal strength' peat smoked porter and it was roundly praised by some mates as my best effort yet. Bit like a normal porter with a depth charge of Ardbeg :shock:

Keen to try it again but stronger..........it's bound to be better if it's stronger :twisted:

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:42 pm
by WishboneBrewery
Will have to wait and see, its fermenting its ass off right now.

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 7:04 pm
by simple one
Wow that's some amount of different malts. Should be pretty complex!

How long you going to condition it? Mines only coming in to a drinkable body after about 6-7 months!

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 8:55 pm
by WishboneBrewery
it is a bit mad, it could be rationalised down to something the same but less complex :)

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 9:04 pm
by WishboneBrewery
The usual, Stout+S-04 ferment :):
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Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 9:45 pm
by Kev888
Nice picture - I always enjoy seeing a good stout fermentation! Looks like its' brains oozing out; good job you thought to weigh down the lid with those paper records.. :-)

Cheers
Kev

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 9:57 pm
by WishboneBrewery
I bet each sheet is a gram, there are 3! of them!!! :D

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 10:06 pm
by GARYSMIFF
Nice, and to think I use the front room at the moment as its cool, if it went of the carpet I'm a dead man:( best not show the boss these pics

Re: AG#55 - Imperial Smoked Porter (now with photos)

Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 7:16 am
by WishboneBrewery
This went into the garage last night where its cooler than the utility room.

Does anyone think it would be Ok to sprinkle 300g of dry sugar into the fermenter?