Today we brew our Porter. This brew is being done specifically as part of a christmas gift basket for our family and friends. We chose this beer for its rich robust festive flavors and its mellow hop bittering.
If you are reading this now and receive one of these as part of your gift next month you should feel loved as this is going to be a special brew.
Only the finest Madagascar vanilla beans and raw cocoa nibs will be used to keep this a top notch beer.
Since this is brew day I will be taking you through the brew process so that people outside of home brewing can see how it is done.
But first lets look at out ingredients and beer profile:
INGREDIENTS:
BEER PROFILE
(Click images to enlarge)
Step one in our homebrew process is to pour yourself a cold homebrew.
After that you can move on to cleaning and sanitizing all of the needed equipment. This task can be tedious but should not be overlooked or underestimated.
We follow a brew in a bag method of all grain brewing. This is not as simple as extract based brewing but it is not as complicated as some other methods either. We have had great success with this and encourage people to try it if they want to try their own hand at brewing.
We start the brewing with a long 1 hour mash of all the grains at a 155*F. This converts the grain starches to fermentable sugars in the wort (that's what the hot beer soup in the pot is called).
We are going to sparge this grain which basically means pouring hot water over the spent grain to wash out any last remaining sugars for our use.
Then our wort is set to boil for 1 hour. We add our hops right at the start for this beer.
At 45 minutes in and 15 remaining we add our lactose (milk sugar), cocoa powder and a whirlfloc tablet ( for clarifying ).
When all of this was completed we chilled the wart with a special copper tubing immersion chiller. When it was chilled to a proper 70* we threw it in a sanitized 6 gallon bucket with a vanilla bean, a yeast enhancer and the yeast.
Now it sits in a dark corner with an air lock system for 2 weeks for primary fermentation.
In two weeks time we will transfer it to a glass carboy for its secondary fermentation where it will wait another 2 weeks.
In 4 weeks it will be ready to bottle and or keg, for carbonation and at about 5 weeks will be ready to consume or be given away as part of a Christmas gift.
And that folks, is how it's done!
Cheers!!!
