It’s brew day! I have been planning another Molasses Porter for some time now. The last time I made this was way back in September 2009. From my previous tasting notes from the final bottle of the that batch I was not happy with the overall product. I found it too heavy in the molasses area. This time around I cut back on the molasses, double the batch size and pitched a much stronger yeast.
Here is the recipe -
- 7.5lbs Pilsner LME
- 0.5lbs Fancy Grade Molasses
- 0.5lbs Demerara Sugar
- 0.5lbs Chocolate Malt
- 0.5lbs Roasted Barley
- 2 oz Northern Brewer Hops @ 60 minutes (I wanted to use Chinook but they did not have any!)
- 1/2 tsp of Irish Moss @ 10 minutes
- 11g SafAle S-33 Dry Yeast (not rehydrated)
Steps -
1) Steep the grains at 75-80c for 30 minutes in 7L of water. Sparged the grains with 1L of 90c water.
2) Add the sugars/extracts to the pot and bring temperature up to a rolling boil (95c~100c). Add hops.
3) Monitor the temperature and boil for the next 60 minutes, stirring the wort every 3-5 minutes to keep the hops from sticking to the side of the pot. (Nothing beats babysitting a massive pot of boiling wort for an hour. Thank god for music).
4) At 10 minutes left add the irish moss to the wort.
5) Remove from heat, cooled with water directly added to the hot wort. Brought the volume up to 6 gallons, but was not able to achieve a low enough temperature for the yeast so I moved the wort into the freezer for 30 minutes to speed up the cooling.
6) Pitched the SafAle S-33 yeast and closed up the batch.
Original Gravity was 1.056. Hoping to achieve a 1.010 final gravity. The estimated cost of this batch is around 35 dollars and I should be able to get 35 pints out of it, so 1 dollar a pint.
The plan is to allow it 3 weeks in the primary, then move it to a secondary to separate the beer from the trub (hops and grain leftovers that settle to the bottle of the fermenter) and clean it up a bit. I will probably give it 2 more weeks in the secondary, move it into bottles and give it 7-10 days of conditioning.
Now its time to start thinking about next weeks brew…