Bourbon Barrel Porter
Sunday was another fun brewing day, I purchased the bourbon barrel porter all grain kit from Northern Brewer.
The day prior I made the yeast starter while enjoying an imperial stout homebrew that has finally come into it’s own.
It started about an hour later than I was hoping because of a meeting, which meant we really had to get this mash going!
Mike from MikesBrewReview came over with some tasty homebrew along with Jake and Jeremy. While the water was heating up for the mash, we sterilized our equipment and got the colts game going on my laptop running mythtv.
The mash went extremely well, and the pot once again retained more heat than I would have expected. We stayed solid at 152* until the very end of the mash, when we needed to raise it t o 170* anyways. The smell was fantastic, a malty chocolate flavor permeated my entire garage.
Next up was the redneck sparge system, and multiple problems. First off, my homemade sparge arm started to fail, water dripped to the edges and down the side of the lauter tun. Secondly, because of this we ran out of hot water to sparge with.
As you can see from the above photo, the sparge arm has fallen into the lauter tun and we had to keep the tube up in the air with a piece of cardboard. I believe it is about time to build two shelves in the garage for this and buy a good setup.
Well, even with all the issues during the sparging step, we did get 6.5 gallons of sweet wort ready for the boil stage.
I decided that I was going to add some extra hops during the boil to see what would happen. So, outside of the recipe I followed I put in 2oz of pure styrian goldings with a low aa range of 2-3 at 45 minutes. It should only raise the IBU to 29 (which is only 4 higher than the normal recipe).
After the Colts win (woooooooooooooooooooooooo!) Jeremy and Jake had to leave to go watch the Vikings game. No problem, more beer for Mike and I!
As you can see, it started getting cold then.
Everyone needs a sunflower heater for the extra propane tank.
After we were finished with the boil, we cooled down the wort and pitched the yeast.
The next day it was already bubbling away (thanks starter)!
I’m really excited for the transfer into secondary. I get to throw bourbon soaked oak chips into it, along with 16oz of bourbon! This might prove to be the tastiest yet!
-Troy
Great post man. Looking back on it, you are right, your setup is a bit more redneck than just a couple of garbage cans and a pickup truck. Only thing missing is a dog…
I am extremely interested in trying your porter next to mine. It was a lot of fun. My favorite part of the day was the hissing propane heater and the laptop streaming the games. I’ve got a similar blog post coming up. I love homebrewing with friends and everyone has something different to share.
Thanks again for the invite! We’ll have to get together soon and sample my porter and American Honey Wheat.
Mike
Mike’s Brew Review
Dudes! What’s up with all the redneck references? Here in the South we can #neckengineer anything to success! Sure we may talk slow, eat grits and drink sweet tea. You don’t see bridges collapse in Georgia.
Ok, so what if The Weather Channel says there is a chance of snow flurries in 4 weeks and we buy all the bread, milk and eggs from every grocery store on? That’s just being prepared y’all!
@RichardShockley
Until now, I have had nothing but good things to say about my sparge system. Redneck FTW!