Third Time Lucky

[booldawg]

Thats the name of tomorrows planned brew purely because I've had 2 attempts at a porter and not made one I truly like. I'm not a huge fan of the style but do like Old Peculiar etc.

Anything wrong with this recipe? The other 2 I made were too harsh dark-grain wise, but then again I relied purely on choc and black malt for the colouring last time.

20L brew-length, 46 IBU

3000g Pale Malt
220g Brown Malt
180g Wheat Malt
140g Roasted Barley
80g Chocolate Malt
60g Black Malt
28g Progess (6.25% AA) – 90 mins
17g Northdowns (8.0% AA) – 90 mins
22g Challenger (5.1% AA) – 90 mins
20g Challenger – Steep
Safale 04 yeast

[Barley Water]

First of all, I really like a well made porter (I am doing a brown porter this weekend in fact) and I have had pretty good luck with both the brown and robust varients. Anyway, and this is just personal opinion, I really don't think roasted barley does very well in a porter. Roasted barley is the signature grain in stouts and to my mind has a very distintive taste, kind of an acid, burnt taste. I think it should never be used in a brown porter but I know that some brewers use it in the robust variety (maybe some do also in the brown variety but I wouldn't). The formulation I use for a robust porter is basicly a modification of a clone of Edmund Fitzgerald porter made here in the states (and the commerical example is one of the clasics I think). I modified the recipie by pulling out the roasted barley which was orginally called for and replaced it with chocolate malt. The beer was much improved in my opinion and in fact won a second place metal at a very large contest over here (and the porter category is the most highly entered style by a lot) about three years ago. The beer had the chocolate, roasty, coffee aspect you would expect with a background flavor of toffee and caramel and was agressively hopped, I am getting all excited just thinking about it.

If you want more of a brown porter, of course Fuller's London Porter is the be all and end all of that style. If you hunt around on this site, you will quickly find a clone for this beer. I have brewed it and I thought it came out really well. To my taste, this beer is all about the brown malt (and the additional flavors developed by the yeast with just a hint of diactyl, God it tastes great). This weekend, I am going to do it again but this time I am going to swap out some of the chocolate malt for the lighter variety chocolate to try and cut back just a little on the roasty flavors and maybe give the beer just a little more complexity. Last year, I got a few comments in competitions that the beer seemed too robust so I guess I will just have to see what happens. Anyhow, I would loose the roast barley, save it for stouts.

[booldawg]

Thanks for the input. I dont really know the fundamental difference between porter/stout/old ale. Maybe I'll pick up some bottles from the offy for 'research'.

I've got 500g of each dark malt so got plenty to play around with.