BREW DAY: Sarcastic Doorman

Today was the day to brew my new experimental small-batch recipe, Sarcastic Doorman rye porter (see the post bellow this one for an early sketch of the label).  As I brew here in my one-room apartment upstairs from my landlord and it's damn cold here in the winter, a one-gallon batch is about as much as I can make without using a kit.

It was a lovely morning for it.

The recipe was hashed out using byo.com's brewing calculator.  There were some last minute changes when I discovered my "one gallon" secondary fermenter wasn't the gallon I originally thought (it seems to be about four liters, actually, which I don't think is a gallon anywhere), but basically the only impact of that was to up the estimated ABV a bit.

While my post-boil equipment was sanitizing, I crushed (really, ground) 120 grams each of chocolate malt and extra dark crystal malt with my little food processor, and chopped up the 500 grams of German pumpernickel I'm using for the rye (input into the calculator as chocolate rye, probably pretty close).

Macro!  You can tell it's not a very thorough "crush", but
it seemed to work pretty well.

These I then loaded into the cooler I'm using for steeping.

I heated my steeping water to 170˚ F (you want to steep cooler than that, but the grains are going to cool the water off when you add it so you overshoot a little to compensate), poured it on, closed up the cooler and waited about fifteen minutes.

After the grains had steeped, I strained them into my brew kettle through a colander lined with cheese-cloth.  Combined with my food processor "crushing" of the grains, this very coarse filtering means I  probably had some bits in the brew liquor, but I don't think it'll be a big deal.  I sparged lightly with some cold water.

Now, to the boil!  As it turns out I underestimated my boil-off (more on that later), so I could have sparged more or gotten a bigger cooler and steeped a greater volume, but it worked out fine.  I added seven grams of Amarillo hops, calculated to give me about 37 IBUs of bittering:

Apparently the only place you can buy a gram-accurate
scale is in a head shop.  Those are hop pellets, though.

And started my sixty minute boil:

The brewing liquor - this is just from steeping the
specialty grains.

Boiling the hops.  This was not an easy shot to get.

Up to this point I still hadn't added the bulk of my fermentables, which are in the form of dry malt extract (DME).  I used 700 grams of dark DME (dark DME was totally unnecessary with the quantity of specialty grains I used, this stuff is going to be opaque), which after some handwaving math means the rye is somewhere around 25-30% of my final grain bill.  The DME didn't go in until about the last ten minutes of the boil; this increases hop utilization, important in a small batch.

Another last minute change to the recipe got made at this point as I decided to do a late addition of two more grams of Amarillo for flavour, rather than the light dry-hopping I had originally planned.

Another reason to add DME late - after putting it in, the
wort foamed so much it about quadrupled in volume, and
had to be stirred constantly to prevent it boiling over.

Finally, I had to chill the wort to pitching temperature (about 70˚F) before I could add the yeast.  I chose Wyeast Labs Scottish Ale Yeast because it's clean and it can handle a wide temperature range - it's easily bellow 60˚F in my brewing closet in the winter.  I used 2.7 kilos of ice purchased from nearest liquor store, which cost me about three bucks, and got it down to pitching temp within ten minutes with the cover on the pot.  (Incidentally, if you're wondering why all my temperatures are in Fahrenheit, it's because I got a lot of my information from American sources and didn't feel like converting today.)

Now, before adding the yeast, it was time to record my original gravity (OG) - this will allow me to estimate the ABV later.

What's this?  1.120?  Potential ABV of 15%?  Whoa, that's not what BYO said, I'm not making barley-wine here...  Turns out, as I said above, I greatly underestimated my boil-off.  After diluting with an extra liter of water:

Reading that scale through foam is a vital skill for the
home brewer.

Much more reasonable, about 1.071-1.072, which is pretty almost dead-on my calculated value.  I tried a sample of the green (unfermented) wort at this point; it's like the sweetest mocha-espresso ever, with a slice of lime in it, which is again pretty well dead-on what I was looking for, or will be once fermentation dries it out.  With bottle conditioning, it should be ready to drink in the beginning of the new year...

My regular batch size fills it up a bit higher.