I have decided to brew a Vanilla Bean Porter recipe that I purchased from the Home Brewing Depot in West Allis. I’m partial to the darker beers and stouts are my favorite. I really like the carmel and chocolate tastes in certain stouts and this one sounded perfect to me.
I also decided to graduate from a full malt/hop/grain extract kit to a recipe where I’d steep my own grains in a muslin bag (big tea bag for steeping hops, grains and adjuncts in your brew).
The beer includes Crystal Malt, Chocolate Malt, and Black Patent grains. It uses a Challenger hop for the bittering hops on the front end of the boil and Cascade hops for aroma near the end. During the secondary fermentation I get to split a vanilla bean and drop it in the fermenter.
I also used a liquid yeast in a Wyeast smack pack instead of pitching dry yeast like I did in Goosebrau. I’ll admit that I didn’t follow instructions and had to purchase another pack and re-pitch, as my fermentation was about 2% compared to my last batch. After I re-pitched my 2nd container of yeast it went off like gangbusters with some great CO2 action in my blow off tube.
I did watch a great video series on Expert Village by Mark Emiley. I’ll be watching more of his videos as I really liked his style of explanation. Here was the video series on brewing a porter. I learned a few tips that will likely improve my process and my brew next time. Off the top of my head, I won’t squeeze my muslin bags to extract every bit of liquid out of them. Rather, I’ll boil about 20 ounces of water, take off heat and pour/rinse the bags with that water. He said squeezing the bags will extract a lot of the natural tannins into the brew, which can cause undesirable tastes. Learning more every time.
My carboy is sitting in the basement, which has a room temp right now of 60 degrees. I pitched the 2nd batch of yeast on January 2nd, so nearly 2 days have gone by and I’m getting about 20 blow bubbles every 10 seconds out of my blow tube. It seems to be very aggressive, so I hope that is good news.
