brown porter

had a hell of a time with this one.

ingredients:
muntons pale, 10 lbs.
muntons crystal, 1 lb.
british amber/brown, 1 lb.
muntons chocolate, 9 oz.

fuggles uk, 1 oz plug, 60 min.
.5 oz, 15 min.
.5 oz, 5 minutes

90 minute boil
pre-boil volume: 7.5 gal.
pr3-boil gravity: 1.044
OG: 1.066
FG: 1.018

mash schedule:
.5 hours @ 104
.5 hours @ 140
.5 hours @ 158

degrees Fahrenheit, mind you

on paper it looks simple enough, but from my perspective the scenario played out quite differently. there were a number of pesky hangups with this batch, namely a stuck mash and running out of propane mid boil. which i know now, every four brewing sessions, i need to fill up on propane. brewing beer is not cheap.

every spring it is windy as shit here in vegas. and every spring everyone is like, "fucking wind, man!" due to the fact that i dont have a wind shield for my propane burner, the wind really messes with me. it takes forever to boil anything. to make matters worse, on this morning, i picked up the propane tank and thought geez, that feels a little light. foolishly, i had not given the tank the ol' pick-up-and-see-how heavy it is-test prior. so instead of just going to get more propane right then and there i decided that i had enough and proceeded with the work at hand. do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

about thirty minutes into the boil, i lost my BTU's. i lugged seven gallons of boiling wort up the steps and into the kitchen. i placed the wort on the stove. my pot is about 1" to tall to fit on my stove. oh yes, i know that now. so i decided to use the front two burners with the kettle hanging off rather precariously. the pot stayed on just fine. but the burners were too widely placed. they were on the outer quarter of the kettle. i turned the back burners on just for the hell of it. the range fan went on automatically. i didnt even know it did that! the boil wasnt coming back. i have a two gallon pot. i filled that up with wort and put it on the burner behind the kettle. i have a one gallon pot. i did the same with that and put it on the other burner behind the pot. i was using the shit out of some natural gas. it was just a waste, a tease.

FINALLY, chessie came home from work. this was about three in the afternoon. i went and got propane. i returned home. i fired up the burner once again. an hour later i was pretty much done.

all this left me rather drained. oh yeah, and i forgot to mention the stuck mash from hell i had. the batch before, i had a stuck mash too, the blonde ale. i had figured it was because the tubing that connected my ball valve to the false bottom was the regular, squishy, clear, vinyl, type. woah, hows that for a string of modifiers? anyway, i had changed the old tubing out before this brown porter batch with the high temp, stiff, cloth braided vinyl type. i thought this stiffer tubing would not get crushed by the weight of the grains when i began to lauter. but begining to lauter again this time, i ran into the same problem. i was able to get a couple quarts, i thought things were going fine and then BAM! stuck mash. it was horrible. i blew into the line, i sucked the line. i jiggled the mash tun, pounded against the sides. if you woulda seen me working that tun you would have been embarassed for me. you'd a thought i was tyrone biggums working the shaft for a ten baggy of crack cocaine!

mental images aside, what i realized is that the problem wasnt so much the tubing(although that could have been part of it) as it was my water to grist ratio. i have been used to keeping my lbs. grain/qts water at a 1/1 ratio. This is fine for single step mashes. The mash at this ratio, in a single infusion is great for lautering. But, when doing a stepped mash, the ratio of water to grain is greatly increased. This increased ratio makes for a much thinner mash. Instead of the grain expanding and getting thick as with a single infusion mash, during a stepped mash, the evolving mash becomes more and more dilute. i have realized that when performing a stepped mash, the amount of water that will be added into the process has to be taken into account. a 1/1 ration is just too much water to start out with. this ratio allows the grain bed to compress with the additions of boiling water to reach the desired temperatures of the steps, instead of staying suspended as with a single infusion. does this make sense? so, the solution is to decrease the ratio of water to grain during the initial infusion, based on the number of steps that will be performed during the mash. that way, the mash will not become too dilute and cause the grain bed to compress upon itself during lautering, thus causing a stuck mash. problem solved.

so other than the stuck mash, running out of propane, and the wind, the brew sesh went fine. i forgot to tell you that the yeast i used was a...no idea. sorry. i must get better at taking notes!