Batch #5 - Arctic Blast Porter

A big snowstorm was headed to Portland (or as the local news dubbed it, an "Arctic Blast"), so I decided to brew up a nice dark porter. This is my second all-grain batch and first porter.

First, I boiled 6.5 gallons of tap water and let it cool. The guy at the brew shop told me that Portland has very soft water - so I added 2 tsp of Gypsum salt to the water. Also heated up 3.5 gallons of sparge water.

Grain Bill

9 lbs American 2 Row
.5 lbs Caramel 80
.5 lbs Domestic Chocolate Malt 350L
1 lb Domestic Munich Malt 10L
.25 lb British Black Malt 500L

Once my water had cooled to 170, I mixed it into my cooler/mash tun with the grain. I gave it a stir every 15 minutes or so and it maintained 154 degrees for an hour.

Next I drained the wort into the boil pot and started sparging. I did the sparge a little different this time, trying to "sprinkle" the water onto the grains rather than pour it in. Once I had 6 gallons of wort - I started heating it up. After boil and hotbreak, I started adding hops -

Hop Schedule

.5 oz Amarillo 60 min
.25 oz Tettnanger
1/2 tsp Irish Moss

.5 oz Tettnanger 40 min

.5 oz Fuggles 10 min

.5 oz Fuggles knockout

After the boil - I chilled to 70 and poured into the fermenter. The gravity was 1.040 at 70 degrees. Not as I high as I had hoped, but not terrible.

I pitched the yeast (WY1028XL). And let it sit for the next 25 days.

After 14 days, the gravity was 1.022.

At bottling, the gravity had dropped to 1.010.

For bottling, I primed with 2.75 oz of a mixture of cane and corn sugar. The beer tasted amazing at bottling - by far the best one I've made. I can't wait to taste the finished product.

Yeild was 25 22oz bottles, 2 17 oz bottles and 1 12 oz bottle. According to the recipator - ABV is only about 4%. Next time I will try to get my mash tun efficiency up, which will bring up my original gravity and ABV.