- Brew Log
Flanko's Punch In The Face Porter
The Iron fist inside an Iron glove
If your wondering who the hell the above two characters are, it's probably because your reading this before they have even appeared in a comic. It's a sad practicality that comics are a lot faster to write than they are to draw, so consequentially I have quite a log-jam of half drawn shit stacked next to my desk. All I can do is ask you to take my word for it when I tell you that Flanko and Flurdle-Frouve will eventually have there day.
Now this porter was actually brewed as a Birthday gift for a friend. It has a portentous name, but to be honest it's based on my brewing mentors recipe. All I did was wreck it by adding everything except the kitchen sink. (cuz it wouldn't fit in my stock pot)
THE GRAIN BILL
- 13 Pounds 2-row
- 9 Ounces crystal
- 12 Ounces black patent
- 2 Ounces peated malt
- 1 Pound wheat malt
- 1 Pound barley flakes
I should draw your attention to the heavy use of Barley Flakes. I have a growing fascination with beta-glucans and the roll they play in texture. This being the first dark beer that I've brewed in over a year, I decided that the time had come to go all the way. Haze be damned.
... The peated malt was thrown in on a lark.
THE MASH PROFILE
Strike with 15.5 Litres @ 76° Celsius for 67° Celsius. Rest for 60 Minutes.
THE RESULTS
Did I say rest for 60 Minutes? I must have filled the mash tun three times trying to get the right standing temperature. I finally got fed up and chanced 74° Celsius. The resulting mash temperature was 64° Celsius. I decided to just leave it be, and ended up doing a three hour mash.
- 3 Ounces fuggles boil (14 AAU)
Looking back, that was probably to decadent a hoping.
Pitched Wyeast 1084
...Pitched is an understatement. PUNCHED would be more accurate. The only 1084 left in the fridge at the Homebrewing supplies store was an "ACTIVATOR", which is really just a quadruple sized "propagator".
I know that a lot of people make a practice of doing starters from propagators, and that's how they are officially meant to be used. I don't have to worry about this because my supplier gets the packs directly from Wyeast, and they are usually no older than two weeks by the time I use them. They puff up in four hours and are good to go for 23 Litres.
Now, the interesting thing about this brew is not that I dumped a crap load of yeast into the fermenter, it's that I had to take an incredible chance at the bottling stage.
It turned out that the birthday party was to be held a week sooner than I thought. The beer wasn't just a gift, it was meant to be THE beer for the party. Oh fuck... What to do? I used a little critical thought, and threw the dice.
Reasoning that a beer that has not fallen clear yet will pick up secondary fermentation (not to be confused with a transfer to a secondary fermentor) faster than a fully attenuated beer, I wondered if I could --transition-- the beer by bottling it a touch early. This would effectively just continue the first fermentation inside the bottles, without any lag time for the yeast to come out of dormancy. It was a porter so I couldn't tell if it had fallen clear yet without the use of a flash light, and even then, with all the wheat and barley flakes who could be sure?
I checked the gravity...
1.015
Looked up the yeast...
Wyeast 1084 "Irish Ale"
Flocculation: Medium
Attenuation: 71-75%
...Then prepared to do the math. I say prepared because there were a few unknowns. Firstly, how fermentable was the wort? It had been a long cool mash, so I was fairly confident assuming that it was "highly" fermentable. This brought me to my second problem. How attenuative had the yeast been? Even with a 100% fermentable wort, the yeast might have under attenuated because of some other factor, like wort density, or temperature fluctuations. As advertised 1084 has a range of 71-75%, but where in that range had it performed? Low, high, or just average? Should I assume 71%, 73%, 75%, or none of the above?
Normally I would never split hairs on a something like this, and I knew that whatever the numbers told me, I was going to have to bottle that beer anyway. I just wanted to get my story straight.
The worst case scenario would be FLAT porter. What would I tell everyone at the party? Could I bullshit my way out of it by greatly exaggerating just how under carbonated Real Ale is supposed to be? ...Unlikely.
Perhaps I could really pull one out of my ass... Something just crazy sounding enough to be true.
"Oh Yeah! It's a German Porter! Co2 is forbidden because it's not listed in the Reinheitsgebot!"
Truth is stranger than even the most desperate lie. Technically, yeast is forbidden by the original Reinheitsgebot. If you think about it, it's ironic, but not inexplicable. They didn't have microscopes in the 16th century, but they DID have meddling politicians writing trade laws, and passing them off as "consumer protection".
--Ahehm!...
So what did I do about that Porter?
I decided to just leave the question of wort fermentability open, and run the numbers for the low, average, and maximum attenuation for 1084, then just LOOK at the results for an hour until I worked up the courage to bottle. If you don't know how to calculate apparent attenuation, your about to learn. There are two ways to do it. First, there is the easy way:
Subtract the last two digits of your finishing gravity from the last two digits of your original gravity, then divide that remainder by your original gravity.
In this case:
60 - 15 = 45
45/60 = 0.75
So that would be 75% attenuation... Apparently.
The disadvantage to this approach is that it only tells you where your beer is, at that moment. It can't give any indication of where your beer is going, though if you get any figure above 70%, chances are you don't have much farther to go.
The second method for calculating apparent attenuation is a little more convoluted, but it provides some predictive power... or wishful thinking, depending on what assumptions you are willing to make.
Take the yeast attenuation as advertised (or as assumed) and subtract it from 100. (IE 75% would be 100 - 75 = 25 or 0.25.) Then multiply the remainder by the last two digits of your original gravity. (IE: 1.045 would be just 45)
Again, in this case the original gravity was 1.060.
SO...
60 X 0.29 = 17.4
60 X 0.27= 16.2
60 X 0.25 = 15
By doing the calculation multiple times through out the envelope of the advertised attenuation, you can get a rough idea of how much room you have to apply your assumption of wort fermentability.
For this beer, it amounted to a finishing gravity of 1.017, 1.016, or 1.015. The fact that the actual gravity at the time was 1.015 left me feeling pretty good about the fermentability of the wort. When I do a cool mash for a dry beer, I often get higher than advertised attenuation, so if this beer was not already done, it had just a little bit more to go, and so the majority of the viable yeast would still be buzzing around, rather than asleep or half dead. More over, this cut down the danger of over carbonization, which was esthetic rather than mortal, as I was going to use PET bottles rather than glass, WHICH IS A GOOD THING TO DO WHEN YOU ARE UNSURE OF YOUR ATTENUATION.
So what was the ultimate result? Success! The beer was not only well carbonated after just two days in the bottles, it formed an excellent head, and sleeve, as I had hoped the Barley flake/Wheat malt combination would yield. The beer was extremely popular at the party and so was I... Until I got drunk out of my mind and started arguing with people about politics. There always has to be some kind of fuck up. It wasn't even really political from my point of view it was more-- philosophical. I wont go into detail, but to give a general picture of the climate. I probably came off about as well as Colonel Sanders would in a yoga class.
The next day I played Paint Ball with many of the same people who were at the party. Despite apologies, I was feeling guilty. I also had a serious hang over, and a sprained toe. (apparently I fell down at some point) Even in my best condition, I suck at paint ball, but I did manage a clear-- if not clean-- kill.
After slithering uphill through ferns and moss for two hours I rolled over the lip of a cliff and staggered my way along it's edge until I spotted some one that I was fairly sure was not on my team. I aimed for his well protected back, but ended up shooting him in the head multiple times.
Whoever it was that I shot made it loudly clear that he did not approve, and so I slithered my way back down the cliff before I could be identified.
One other person had witnessed my heroic ambush though, and that turned out to be one of my main antagonists from the night before. He cheerfully congratulated me.
Beer under the bridge?
OG: 1.060
TG: 1.015