Partigyle seems to be the word of the day! Brew day was Sunday, Jan 12. Brewing this recipe:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f68/russian-imperial-stout-2011-hbt-competition-category-winner-238807/
and capping the mash for a small beer, because why not!? Gonna either let the small beer sit in secondary with vanilla or chocolate, or bottle with either a vanilla tea or coffee, to make some kinda flavored stout. In hindsight, I should have bought an extra pound of very dark or roasted malt to cap the small beer, but even without that, this will still be tasty beer.
— RIS —
Recipe Type: All-Grain
Yeast: Fermentis S-33
Yeast Starter: yeast cake from batch 28
Batch Size (Gallons): ~5 gallons
Original Gravity: 1.080
Final Gravity:
IBU: ~87
Boiling Time (Minutes): 60
Color: 52?
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 1 month primary, 3 months secondary
17# Rahr 2-row
1.5# Roasted Barley
1# Special B
.75# Chocolate Malt
.5# CaraPils
3.5oz Northern Brewer 60 min
2oz EK Goldings 30 minutes
1 whirlfloc – 10 minutes
2.5 tsp yeast nutrient – 10 minutes
Mash in with ~8 gal strike water at 162* (almost filled the big blue cooler). sparged with ~2 gal ~175*. Heavy Fermentation & blowout within 6 hours. Whut.
SG: 1.066 (1.05 corrected from 145*)
OG: 1.080 (1.078 corrected from 80*)
Might it be worthwhile to let a gallon of this sit on oak for a month or so?
— Small Beer —
Added 1# 2-row, 0.5# C60 to mash from RIS, also added ~5 gal water at ~150* (there was still some water left in the mash tun from the RIS – total final yield for the small beer was over 5 gal).
1oz Willamette at 60 minutes
1oz Cascade at 20 minutes
whirlfloc
SG: 1.034 (1.02 corrected from 135*)
OG: 1.040
Pitched the yeast cake from 1gal additional batch 27 (Fermentis S-04)
UPDATE 1/16/14 – small beer is starting to clear, while the RIS is still cloudy and moving around.
UPDATE 1/19/14 – small beer 1.006 (4.5%, 85% attn), RIS 1.018 (8.1%, 76% attn)
UPDATE 1/26/14 – small beer 1.005 (4.6%, 87% attn), RIS 1.013 (8.8%, 83% attn) time to play with the small! gonna split it up and do some with coffee, some on vanilla bean, some with cocoa, and some on hops!
UDPATE 2/1/14 – bottled the small beer. I split, scraped, and soaked half of a vanilla bean (Trader Joe’s bourbon madagascar vanilla bean) in enough vodka to cover it. I put 1 gallon of the small beer onto the vanilla bean, 1/2 gallon was dry hopped with 0.5 oz Northern Brewer leafs, another 1/2 gallon was dry hopped with 0.5oz Cascade leafs, and an additional 750ml was mixed with 1/3-1/4c of coffee from the french press. The rest was bottled as-is, yielding exactly a full case of beer!
UPDATE 2/13/14 – the porter is damned tasty. It needs to be closer to room temperature than fridge temperature to really shine, and when it warms up from the fridge it gets nice and roasty with a bit of chocolate and a hint of coffee. I have yet to bottle the vanilla and dry-hopped beers. They will need to be bottled asap. The vanilla tasted delightful about 3 days in, and tasted not much different about a week in. I’m hoping to get that a little past where I want it, so that as it bottle conditions and sits for a while, it will come back to where I want it. I sampled the NB and Cascade dry hops a few days ago. Cascade tastes better, but they both might benefit from being mixed together before bottling. I might have also done better to dry hop this with the CTZ that I got. Next time … 😉
UPDATE 2/16/14 – bottled the vanilla porter by itself (11 twelve-ounce bottles, plus a partial bottle that was delicious), and combined and bottled the NB and Cascade dry-hopped porters (9 twelve-ounce bottles, plus a partial). Both promise to be tasty. However, both were a bit thin, and could probably use something additional in the cap next time, such as some oatmeal, dextrine, or additional malty-tasting malt.
UDPATE 2/24/14 – transferred the RIS to a glass secondary, and I’ll let that ride for a few months
UPDATE 4/27/14 – Bottled! and delicious 🙂 bottled with 2.5oz priming sugar, yielded 42 bottles. I added a packet of Lavalin D47 yeast to the bottling bucket before racking the beer, to assure happy carbonation