Porter

Today was the first brew with the new grain mill and everything went pretty smoothly. I anticipated having an increase in efficiency because of the grain mill so I tried to control my boil off and have a higher final volume to decrease the gravity. Our normal efficiency was ~73% and today it was 80% all thanks to the grain mill. This batch of porter is mostly acting as a starter so that we can use the yeast for the barleywine we are going to make in about 2 weeks. Because of the very high gravity of the barleywine it takes about double the amount of yeast to ferment. Instead of having to make a starter essentially twice, we just make a batch of beer, use the yeast, and get another beer out of it. I was wanting a lower gravity ale this time and the OG was 1054, so the beer should finish at about 5-5.2% alcohol. We have been making a lot of +7% beers lately, so I wanted something that you could drink more than one and a half of before getting crazy.

With the barleywine just using the first runnings we are going to again make a "small beer" from the second runnings. I am planning on making this similar to a British bitter because the OG is going to be around 1045ish. We are going to add some flaked barley to increase the body, lightly hop it to around 40 IBUs and use a British yeast strain. The British yeast is from a batch we made back in August, so to make sure the yeast is OK and healthy we are making a starter today. After draining all the wort from the mash tun, I added another gallon of water, drained that, and boiled it down so the gravity was about 1030, which is ideal for starters. The starter is too large for the 3 gallon small beer, but we are going to save the extra healthy yeast for another batch in the future.

Since we bought our base grain in bulk, this 4.5 gallon batch of porter only cost $22 including the $7.75 pack of new yeast. We usually dont have to buy yeast, so if that were the case this beer would have only been $15. We are going to use this pack of yeast for this beer, the BW, an imperial stout we are planning, and will hopefully have enough left over from porter to use in another beer after that. Last year, the barleywine cost about $50 for the 3 gallons, but this year it will only cost $29.15 for the 3 gallons, and then the small beer will only be $4 for the extra grains we are adding and the hops are free because we are going to use small amounts of extras left over from other batches.