I really enjoyed the porter that I had brewed before, so I decided to use that recipe as a loose base for designing this beer. Gainesville has a local coffee roaster, Sweetwater, who produces some very nice stuff and I wanted to add some of this to my beer. Initially I wanted to make this into an "imperial" porter, so I added several pounds of base malt and honey. In the end I believe that using grain bags isn't effective when dealing with the amounts of grain I used in the batch and I think this combined with not enough mash time resulted in underconversion. This beer was a real learning experience and I want to try it again some time with better grain conversion procedures. Nonetheless the resulting beer isn't bad- it's super dark and super thick. The coffee flavor came out just fine (I'd actually use a little less coffee next time) and the honey and maple syrup are hardly noticeable in the flavor.
Ingredients:
- 7lb Briess Dark LME
- 3lb 6-row base malt
- lb chocolate malt
- 1/2lb German Carafa
- 1/2lb Crystal 60L
- 2 cups Tupelo honey (~1.5lb)
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1/2 lb sweetwater "good morning gainesville" full-city roast coffee (after boil)
- 1/2oz chinook hop pellet @ 60min
- 1/2oz chinook hop pellet @ 30min
- 1/4ox Willamette hops @ 5min
- 1/6 cup gypsum @ 20min
- 1 tablet whirfloc @ 15min
- 1 vial whitelabs irish ale yeast in 1L starter
- dextrose and maple syrup for priming (see below)
I altered my mash times a little to account for the base malt conversion- though it still wasn't long enough. ~130F for 15 min and ~150 for 50 min.
After the boil I added the ground up 1/2 lb of coffee in a grain bag to the cooling wort. Steeping this way added plenty of flavor.
OG was 1.072
Fermentation slowed significantly after a few days and on day 4 I took a gravity reading: 1.029. Two days later I took another reading and it was 1.028. Since it didn't seem to be moving I decided to bottle. I'm not sure why the FG was still so high.
The 3/4 cup (4 oz) dextrose I had ordered had leaked some in shipment I decided to add ~1oz maple syrup to my primer... this turned out to be too much and this beer will gush when opened if it isn't chilled first.
So I made plenty of mistakes with this beer, but in the end it's not bad. Several of my friends really enjoyed it so that's the joy of homebrewing! Even a batch riddled with mistakes can come out pretty good.
