Baby steps towards bigger steps

Last post, I discussed the purchasing of my mash tun and the plans to brew the chocolate stout from the Fisk Boys days. Thursday night, I did just that, although tweaking the recipe to be a partial mash batch rather than an all-extract batch. Except this time, when I mashed, I used my mash tun instead of mashing in a bag. Baby steps towards the big step of all grain, but an important step nonetheless.

The picture to the right is pretty much my idea of bliss. Brewing my next batch with a fresh homebrew in hand. Or in this case, on top of my mash tun. Had to take a picture. . . I mean, it was simply too glorious not to.

Last time around, I mentioned that I would post my recipe from the chocolate stout, and here it is:

6# Dark Dried Malt Extract (DME)

5# 2-Row

12oz US Chocolate Malt

8oz Crystal 60L

4oz British Chocolate Malt

4oz Caravienne

4oz Roasted Barley

2oz Galena (13.4% AA) 60 minutes

2oz Fuggles (4.4%) 2 minutes

Wyeast #1098 British Ale

In my mash tun, I mashed the 5 pounds of 2-Row with the 2 other pounds of grains for 7 total mashed pounds of grain. My efficiency wasn't perfect, as I did not sparge with more than just my first runnings, but that's okay; I wasn't gunning for a huge efficiency anyway, since I didn't want the beer to run too alcoholic this time around. Plus, I was brewing a 5 gallon batch for a 5 gallon carboy. . . which is a stretch in the first place. If I had hit my maximum efficiency with those grains, I'd be pushing 10% ABV, and now I'm hovering right around 9%, which is more of what I'm going for this time around.

To put it simply, the higher the starting gravity, the more sugar you have in your wort, and therefore the more potential alcohol for your beer. You can under-attenuate your beer intentionally to make sure that it doesn't get to the maximum potential ABV, but you'll end up with a lot of residual sweetness from those unconverted sugars. And that tends to not be a good (read: tasty) thing. So, by not sparging my grains, I probably left about .007 to .01 gravity points on the table, and I'm okay with that. As it is, my original gravity was about 1.078, which, if my yeast performs like I expect it to, should hit about 1.012 for a final, meaning I have about an 8.8% beer. Which is what I'm going for this time around.

My yeast was so primed and ready when I pitched it, it had reached a solid krausen less than twelve hours later, and by the time 18 hours had passed, my beer was churning so hard you could hear it in the closet with the door closed, bubbling away from the blow-off tube into the sanitized water cup. Like I said, about 4.5 gallons of beer in a 5 gallon fermenter doesn't leave a ton of room for the krausen, and I'm aware that I probably need to address that in the future. With a big batch, however, this can potentially lead to some problems. Which I encountered. But having learned my lesson from last time around with this stout, a blow-0ff tube from the start is ESSENTIAL.

This time, when the krausen became so ferocious, instead of sending my airlock flying and covering my closet with sweet, delicious chocolate beer, it just went up into my blow-off tube and into the water cup. This did not last for more than 4-6 hours, but it was more than enough to turn the cup of water into what looked like a pint of stout. After changing it out, however, the beer is not through the primary phase of fermentation and coasting into the secondary. I think I'll rack it over to the secondary later this week, where it will rest for the next 10 days to two weeks.

I have never done a secondary before, and here's why: I don't usually need to. A secondary fermenter is not essential for many styles of homebrew, especially ones that are lower in alcohol or that do not need filtering. A secondary allows you to "brighten" your beer, racking off a lot of the waste, husks, and excess crud in the beer (known as "trub") and into a clean fermenter, where it can round out the remaining sugars in relative peace. It also allows you to rack your beer onto new ingredients, called "dry-[insert item being added here]." This naming convention came from dry-hopping, which is a process of adding more hops to beer after the boil and primary fermentation has been completed. It lends a wonderful hop aroma, packing a great floral punch, but lends nothing to the flavor. Recently, brewers have started adding other ingredients to the beer in a "dry" manner, such as vanilla beans, cocoa nibs, spices, herbs, tea, bourbon, coffee, you name it. A secondary allows you to do that. I will probably be using a secondary on this beer, if for no other reason that I need to do it sometime, and my carboy is completely caked on the inside with krausen residuals.

When it comes time to bottle this stout, I have something special in mind. Namely, bottling it in three different phases, leaving me with roughly 7 different bottles with different flavors. The three phases are going to be the original, unaltered chocolate stout, and the other two will have cold-pressed coffee and homemade vanilla bean extract added to them, respectively. Homebrew club, you've been warned. Now here's to hoping it works out!

Will keep you updated on how it turns out. And in the meantime, I'm going to get to stewing on what to brew next, and I think it may be time to go all grain.