I have a vent hood to allow steam to escape during the boil, powered by a Vortex VTX600 fan capable of 452 CFM. The kettle is heated by a 3500W induction cooktop ( Avantco 3500) which is plugged into a 40 A stove outlet (via a custom adapter cord). My setup is very similar to most people’s turkey fryer and cooler setup, I batch sparge in a cooler, and boil in a 10 gallon kettle. The heart of my brewery is a 10 gallon stainless kettle ( Bayou Classic 1040) and a 10 gallon Igloo cooler with false bottom. My favourite thing about it is that I can leave it set up, which saves considerable time on brew day. In the interest of making this post digestible I am going to skip over some of the details and explain them as I go.įirst thing’s first, here is my brewery (image below). Continue reading →īefore I start posting about recipes and brew days I thought it would be a good idea to start with a post about my setup and an explanation of how I do things at a high level. Since the OG was significantly higher than anything I had brewed before, I decided to set my brewhouse efficiency to 60%, hoping that if anything I would overshoot a bit. Even with the mash thickness set to 1.0 qt/lbs I needed to up my boil time to 2 hours to be able to use a decent amount of sparge water. I took the percentages of their grain bill and adapted it for my system and expected efficiency (much lower than my usual 75%). I was a bit skeptical because the Oscar Blues website doesn’t mention crystal malt in the recipe, only 2 row/chocolate/roasted barley/flaked oats. It also happens to be brewed near Denver, Co, where Rebecca and I are going for our honeymoon in February. I did a bit of research and found that someone had made a homebrew recipe with the help of the brewer. One RIS I really enjoy is Oscar Blues Ten Fidy, with mysterious opaque black colour and intense roast profile. I hadn’t brewed an imperial stout before so I decided to look for inspiration from some of my favourite examples. Increasing the lovibond of the crystal malt should give less caramel sweetness, and more nutty/toffee which suits a roast porter nicely. It also just happens to be the #1 example of the style according to the BJCP. Their website says they use Crystal 77L (probably Crisp) so I bumped my crystal from 45L to 65L to get a bit closer. I also happened to drink a bottle of Edmund Fitzgerald (by Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewery) for the first time a few days before and loved it. I mashed this beer at 154*F last time and it finished at 1.018, so I bumped it down this time to 152*F hoping to dry it out a bit more. With this in mind I bumped up the chocolate and black malts by 2 oz each. The last time I brewed this it came out with a bit too much milk chocolate flavour and too low in roast, so I approached this recipe with intent of tweaking it for more roast, and a dryer finish. For version 1.0 of this beer I ended up adapting Jamil’s Robust Porter recipe to my system volumes and efficiencies. Usually that starts with Brewing Classic Styles (BCS) and then I also look at some well regarded clone recipes of classic examples of the style. With that in mind I start to do some research by looking at some well established recipes. The flavour should feature lightly burnt black malt character with everything else supporting and balancing that. There should be a noticeable roasty aroma accompanied by some supporting malt aromas. In this case, the key points of Robust Porter are all about the malt. When I am looking to brew a beer style that I never have before I start by going to the BJCP guidelines to get an understanding of the style and the main flavours and aromas associated with it. This recipe is a tweaked version of the original recipe I brewed. This post I am going to try to give a short insight to my recipe creation and tweaking process. A perfect kettle trub cone after the whirlpool.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |