First time brewing a Porter - Need help!

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Kunal Vanjare

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Hello guys, hope you'll are doing well.

I am 6 months into this hobby and have brewed 3 Pale Ales which have ranged from disastrous to pretty bad.
:stuck_out_tongue:


I now am eager to brew a Porter (1 Gallon). All the 3 brews I have done so far have been using the Brewers Friend Windows Software which has stopped working. So I have tried Beersmith and the Brewfather app, must say, I found Brewfather to be much more suitable so I am going to use that.

The recipe goes like this :-
BIAB
Pale 2-row : 980grams
Caramel 60 : 90grams
Chocolate : 60grams
Roasted Barley : 60grams
Flaked Oats : 30grams

Hops include Cascade & Centennial (target - 36 IBU).
Pre-Boil Gravity : 1.054, Original Gravity : 1.072, Final Gravity : 1.018

The recipe calls for 3.2Ltrs of Strike water & 3.49Litrs of Sparge water. Is this correct? Beersmith & the Brewer's Friend web-tool show very much different volumes of water mostly due to the boil-off rate. Boil-off on Brewers Friend is somehow stuck at 1.5 Gallons per hour i.e around 6 Litres per hour which does not usually happen on my 10Ltr Stock Pot. I end up losing around 1.5-2 Litres.

I would love for somebody to tell me if I am doing something wrong here because I don't want to end up throwing darts in the dark, again!

Also, the recipe calls for salt additions of Gypsum, Calcium Chloride & Baking Soda to hit a pH of around 5.5. Hope this is correct, as I would be using RO to begin with (don't have a water quality report of my local water here in Mumbai, India).

Any help will be great. Thanks
:slight_smile:
 
If you like porters, do yourself a favour and buy a copy of Brewing Porters and Stouts by Terry Foster, so much good advice, and recipes, in that little book. For example, I switched to using some brown malt in my recipes after reading it, and they tasted so much nicer. athumb..
 
No need for the roast barley and oats, but brown malt is the defining ingredient of London porters, although it seems to be a bit of a Marmite ingredient.

See this thread for a picture of one of Fuller's brewbooks with enough information to take a stab at their porter, which is pretty much the definitive example of the London style : Fullers recipes for ESB/Pride/Chiswick, Imperials, NEIPA - from the horse's mouth
 
If you like porters, do yourself a favour and buy a copy of Brewing Porters and Stouts by Terry Foster, so much good advice, and recipes, in that little book. For example, I switched to using some brown malt in my recipes after reading it, and they tasted so much nicer. athumb..
The best porter that I ever brewed used marris otter, brown malt and black patent
 
I agree that Brown Malt is the ingredient for a Porter. The Durden Park pamphlet has an Appendix with instructions for roasting Pale Malt (uncrushed) into Brown in an oven - preferably fan-assisted. I have only done this once and very recently, but you line a large roasting tray with aluminium foil and fill to about 0.5 inch with whole grains. Roast at 110C for 45 mins (to dry) then @150C for 30mins, and then @ 175C until it reaches the "colour of brown wrapping paper". (This is a bit mumbo-jumbo, but if you peer at it and stir the grains a bit to get even-ish colouring, every 20mins or so, it will be fine. It may not be a Brown Malt technically, but it should do the job OK.

On the subject of recipes, the GH Brown Porter is a brilliant and session-able beer.
 
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