Resurrection Porter

[monkeyboy]

First brew day in over three years. A new puppy and changes in work meant that it's been impossible to find the time. But I think the reality is that after failing dismally to manage to create a good hopped-up IPA I lost enthusiasm a little. Anyway, whatever the reason, yesterday was a return to the saddle.

Decided to start simple with a porter. I had various odds and sods left lying around from before. The grain was mostly vacuum packed, and when I tasted it, it seemed totally fine so I went with it.

Grains:
2100g Pale malt
300g wheat malt
300g Crystal
500g Munich
100 Chocolate
400g Biscuit
200g Carafa 3

Mashed overnight. Probably started a little high, at about 69C but otherwise went pretty well. Lost a fair bit of temp overnight which meant I had trouble hitting the right sparge temp in the batch sparging. Must remember to wrap the mash tun up nice and warm next time. Got about 24L and after boiling has about 21 @ 1.044 which is more or less what brewsmith predicted.

Hops:
20g Northdown as first wort, boiled for 60mins (~22IBU)
25g EKG with 5 minutes to go and then 40g EKG at flameout

Yeast: WLP013.
First time I've used the new whitelabs packaging and I have to say it's much better than the old test tubes - I used to have a devil of a time getting all the yeast out without accidentally spraying it all over the place.

A day later the airlock is bubbling away and I'm trying to work out what I screwed up because it all went suspiciously well! No pictures this time because I was far too busy concentrating on remembering what to do!
And now I've got my eye on some shiny stainless steel brewing kit. My old plastic boiler has definitely seen better days...

[Hanglow]

Wow three years? Welcome back I've not been able to brew for a few months due to extending my house and i'm getting itchy to brew again. Hope the porter works out

I think the main thing to not being able to brew a good modern IPA is usually oxidation somewhere on the cold side - leaving too long in a bucket, some bad bottling/kegging etc .

[monkeyboy]

Yeah, I was the same once, but things changed.

With IPAs the problem wasn't that the beer was bad - no stale flavours or anything. It was just that I was never able to reproduce that massive hop aroma that you get opening some commercial examples. I tried all kinds of late hopping, and it would smell fantastic in the FV but by the time I opened a bottle it all seemed to have vanished. The beer was still okay, just not great.

I'm going to give it another go.