Coffee Porter

   Last Thursday was a crazy day.  Normally when I plan to brew a beer I plan ahead at least a few days.  This time I decided that morning that I was going to brew.  Not only did I decide that I was going to brew, but I also chose the recipe, decided to make a wort chiller, and did I mention it was my first attempt at all-grain?  Nonetheless, I thought that I could make it happen that night.  After work I went to the Home Depot to get the wort chiller supplies and then ran to the homebrew store to grab the ingredients.

  The beer I made is a Coffee Porter.  

Ingredients: 

grain: 2-row malt

specialty grains: chocolate, munich dark, caramel 120L

hops: mt. hood (finishing and aroma), perle (bittering),

yeast: wyeast irish ale yeast

priming: light brown sugar

miscellaneous: coffee (sweet puppy love from wired puppy)

When I got home from work I threw 6 gallons of water on the stove and waited for the small stove burner to bring it to a strike temperature of 171.

  When the water reached 171 I added the grains.  I was hoping for a mash temperature of 159, but when I added the grains it only brought the temperature down to 163, so I added cold water to the mash until it reached 161.  I left the mash to do its business and proceeded to start on the wort chiller. 

 My original intention was to check on the mash every 15 minutes (total mash time one hour), but I got distracted making the wort chiller.  Looking back I should have made the wort chiller while the water was heating up, but I was hungry and used that time to make dinner.  Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.  When I checked the mash temp the first time 30 minutes in I found that it had dropped significantly to 140.  It took about 20 minutes to get it back up to 156.  To compensate I added 15 minutes to mash (truthfully I have no idea if this will actually change anything. With the higher mashing temp I was hoping for a fuller bodied beer.  The lower temp will result in more fermentable sugars leading to a thinner beer, but it will be more alcoholic, and that's not the worst thing in the world.  My understanding is that the difference is not huge, so I'm hopeful.

After mashing comes sparging. This is the act of pouring hot (~175 degree) water over the grains to rinse all the sugars from the spent grain and collecting the sweet, sweet wort for boiling.

Lautering/sparging took about 25 minutes.  In the future I may save the spent grains to make bread or something along those lines, but not this time.

It took an hour to bring the wort to a boil.  I boiled the wort for an hour.  The perle hops boiled for an hour, half the mt. hood for 15 minutes, and the rest of the mt. hood went in at flame out.

15 minutes before the end of the boil I put in the wort chiller to sanitize it.  When the boil was complete I started cooling the wort.  The faster the wort is cooled and the yeast is added the less chance there is for bacterial contamination.  Cooling took 25 minutes.

Initial gravity: 1.061
Estimated ABV: 7%
Primary Fermentation: 7 days

After the primary fermentation was complete I transferred the beer to the secondary fermenter and added a pot of strongly brewed coffee.  The beer is a nice dark brown color and smells delicious. There is a strong hoppy aroma that will fade and I am looking forward to seeing what the coffee adds to the aroma.  I did not taste it at this stage. Secondary fermentation will last for another week.  Bottling will take place next thursday.

I am definitely looking forward to having a closet full of homebrew again!  Up next is either an all-grain revisit to the extract double ipa or an attempt at an original ipa.