Brew Day tomorrow! - Honey Porter

[Blackmuse]

Okay,
so my wife just let me know she and the boy would be gone most of the day tomorrow and "what are you gonna do?" BREW! So I spun this up real quick - my dad loves Sam Adams Honey Porter so this is for him.

What do you all think? I'm going to pick up the ingredients tomorrow so any feedback would be much appreciated!

http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/r ... side-honey

 

[LarryBrewer]

Looks great with the following comments:


I would cut down the late Goldings addition. You don't want that interfering with the malt. Maybe just 0.5 - 1 oz, instead of 2 oz.

The water profile needs to be amped up with brewing salts. You want more hardness in the water to match the dark style - balanced profile II is what I would shoot for.

 

[Blackmuse]

I wanted to ask you about that... There are a few things that my report doesn't list - those are left blank. My hardness comes in at 203 mg/L... Is that the same as alkalinity? I'm not up with the whole water profile thing and I'll admit I can get pretty confused when I attempt to read about it.

Plus, I think my report was taken with the water running through the filtration/softener, but 203 seems high. Especially being AFTER the softener- so maybe it was taken at a point before the softener?

I'll take your advice on the salts... What is "balanced profile II"? Forgive my ignorance but I'm completely new to the water thing.

 

[LarryBrewer]

Hardness and alkalinity are strongly related. Your water report could be in CaCO3 or in HCO3. This site uses Bicarbonate (HCO3-) as the measure of alkalinity. If your water report specifies alkalinity or hardness as CaCO3, multiply that number by 1.22 to get the HCO3- value.

Hardness over 150 is suited to darker beers. If you are going to brew a light beer, you will need to dilute with spring water. It sounds like you might be good to go for a dark beer without any modification. Keep in mind though the recipe is shared. If someone else sees the recipe, they might think you really mean to have zero calcium in the water profile, which isn't recommended, especially for a dark beer.

I bet the folks at your local home brew store (LHBS) would know more about your local water profile and how to get good results from it.

Balanced Profile II is one of our default profiles in the recipe editor under the water section. If you select it, values for all the ions will be filled in.

 

[Blackmuse]

Right on. Under hardness in my report it just says Hardness (mg/L) - I'll call the company later this week (maybe tomorrow) to see. I'll also ask about calcium and sulfate. For now I'll leave the fields blank as I usually do. (no water profile selected). Thanks for the input! I took your advice on the east kent and lowered it to 1 oz. - I think east kent and whitbread may be my favorite hops!

 

[Nosybear]

I'd kill the amber malt extract, too, and up the coloring malts and crystal a bit. I'd assume the homebrew shop goes through a lot more light malt extract than amber so the light will be fresher. Good luck and let us know how it comes out!

 

[Nosybear]

One more thing: Since you're brewing with extract, I'm going to assume you're fairly new to brewing (if I'm wrong, please forgive me). So I'll say this about water chemistry: Don't obsess on it. If you really are new, focus on your process and continue brewing the same beer until it tastes the same every time. As homebrewers, our process determines our outcomes more than minor recipe tweaks or salt additions. Get the process down, get it consistent, and make sure it is producing consistent results before worrying about your water. If it's in a usable range, and I think yours is, it will produce good results. There's likely far more variance in the results produced by that amber malt than by your water due to the malt syrup's age, handling, heat and so forth. But once your process variance is so small you can't detect it from batch to batch, then you can start thinking about more advanced and less influential factors like water chemistry.

 

[Blackmuse]

Nosy, I am pretty new. About a dozen or so brews. I did recently start changing my recipes around to use light dry extract as the base and color from the grains due to what I had read about amber and munich extracts. Pretty much like you mentioned (consistency and shelf time). I originally had it this way on this recipe too but had been moving some things around to play with color. Per your recommendation I went back to only light extract and added another 8 oz of crystal.

I always told myself to ignore the water stuff as I wasn't doing all-grain or anything and just wanted to get the hang of brewing. Curiosity strikes! I've read quite a bit about brewing and think I ought to now go back and start reading through the water stuff and such.

 

[Nosybear]

Stay curious, my friend! It's what keeps us going once we have the "consistency" thing down! Or is it thirsty???