2013-05-18: racked, bulk primed with 140g sucrose and bottled.

Topped up from 19L to 21, OG 1.048.

2013-05-09: racked and bulk primed with 80g sucrose.

• Cacao Puffs Porter (Chocolate Porter)
• Anyone have a Chocolate Porter recipe
• Chocolate Porter – Home Brew Recipe
• Formulating and Brewing a Winning Chocolate Porter

And restricted to what I happened to have in the cupboard, it’s time to do a chocolate porter. I’m planning to do vanilla and cocoa in secondary.

2.6kg marris otter pale ale malt
750g munich malt
750g vienna malt
120g chocolate malt
100g black malt
100g carafa special III
150g amber malt
150g porridge oats
34g Northern Brewer, 9.26%AA at 45 mins
14g Styrian Goldings, 4.5%AA at 15 mins
14g East Kent Goldings, 5.2%AA at 5 mins

Mashed in and added heat until reaching 66C for an hour or so. Strike water at 80. Continuous sparged, initial volume 20L. Boil as listed, no chill in pot outside overnight. Syphoned into fermeter, topped up from 17.5L to 20L and pitched 11g Windsor yeast at 19.5 degrees.

2013-01-05: Racked onto 340g Rowse orange blossom honey (pasteurised in some water at 85C for around an hour), 140g coacoa powder and 4 teaspoons of vanilla extract.

Mashed in with as much water as will fit in my 12L pot, probably around 7-8L at 78C, hitting a mash temp of 66C after adding some boiling water. Sparged with about 5L of 84 degree water. Boil volume around 10L.

Heated the cans in a sink of hot water, and dumped the contents into the fermenter. Rinsed cans with boiling water into fermenter. Added 3.5L boiling water and stirred to dissolve. Topped up to 23L with cold water. Pitched yeast.

14/1/2012: Picked 2.5kg of sloes, rinsed them and heated to 80 degrees with just enough water to make a thick syrup, using a potato masher to mash them up a bit. Left them at 80 degrees for about half an hour to pasteurise them, then added to an empty fermenter, and racked the beer on top, mixing it through the sloe syrup/mash. This frothed up a lot, and seeing as it now comes up to 25L, there’s very little head space, so it’s continuing to overflow a bit, so I’ve just left the lid slightly cracked on one side to allow the froth to bubble over in a controlled manner to avoid explosion. At least there are no drosophila around right now.

21/1/2012: Racked the beer off the heavy fruit slurry, using a sieve over the intake of the hose, leaving about 3L of slurry behind. The beer is a deep pink colour and very cloudy. I’ve been keeping it warm with a few pint bottles full of boiling water inside a towel wrapped around the fermenter. A kind of hot water bottle for beer. Trying to keep it between 18 and 19. Given its cloudiness, I’ll leave it to clear for at least a few days now.

6/2/2012: After leaving outside in the freezing winter temperatures and even having brought it in and added pectinase and leaving it for a couple more weeks, it was still super cloudy. So I racked, bulk primed with 100g sucrose and bottled.

9/2/2012: I can’t believe it. It’s completely cleared, dropping around 1cm of very loose sediment to the bottom. I hope it compresses a lot more, then this could end up a good beer, despite its travails.

12.5L @ 74 degrees C, for mash temp of 67 degrees C.  30 minute mash, adding heat when necessary to maintain temperature.  Strike water temp 84 deg C.  Stuck sparge.  Added a lot more strike water, reset grain bed.  Good continuous sparge, over 30 minutes.  Total of 26L.  Brought to boil, added hops as scheduled. Put outside overnight to chill, brought inside in the morning, syphoned into fermenter in the evening, pitched yeast. 22L @ 1.050

Rob: Note that there are some pretty serious no-nos in the method below:

• never boil honey; add it at the end of the boil so as to conserve the delicate aroma molecules that make honey the joy that it is.
• I see no reason to skim off the kruasen during fermentation; you’ll remove healthy yeast and risk infection.
• Never brew to a particular specific gravity.  Always brew to completion (generally defined by the same SG reading three days in a row), then add a controlled amount of priming sugar during bottling or racking.  I like to bulk prime.

125g heather tips (softer green parts of the plant, with the flowers if possible)
30g dry heather twigs (to provide tannin)
60g yarrow (the feathery leaves plus the flowers if possible)
30g dried hops
1.8kg honey (the nicer the better, but cheap honey will be absolutely fine)
1.3kg malt extract (Edme SFZ or similar – from a home-brew store)
500g crushed crystal malt (home-brew store)
1 tsp dried carragheen (Irish moss)
1 sachet of ale yeast
25 litres of water

Steep the crystal malt grains in 10 litres of water at 65C, cover and leave for 30 to 40 minutes. Strain the grains from the “wort”, as the liquor is called, remembering to throw away the used grains and not the wort (a terrible novice mistake!). Add 5 litres of hot water to the wort and bring to the boil. Add the malt extract, yarrow, heather, twigs and hops and boil for one hour. Savour the truly wonderful aroma. After one hour add the carragheen and the honey and boil for another 30 minutes, then leave to rest for further 30 minutes.

Drape a large muslin cloth over a large sieve and strain your brew into a 25 litre plastic fermenting bin. Top up to 25 litres by pouring some cold water through the muslin and its aromatic contents. Cover and leave to cool to room temperature. Swish with a spoon or whisk to aerate the wort until there is a bit of a froth on the top. Allow to settle then add the yeast according to the instructions on the packet. Cover.

After 24 to 36 hours a cauliflower-like head will have form on the surface. Skim this off and allow the beer to continue fermenting until the specific gravity has dropped to 1010 (this is where the hydrometer comes in). Siphon into clean beer bottles or into a 25 litre plastic pressure barrel. Check every day or so to make sure the pressure has not reached explosive potential. The beer “conditions” (carries on fermenting) in the bottle, creating more alcohol, reducing the sugar and adding fizz. It is ready to drink after one to two weeks, though I couldn’t wait that long and drank a, slightly sweet, pint eight hours after bottling.

Ginger diced finely then left in the fridge for 5 days (hopefully this enhanced the flavour . Light crystal steeped in 80 degree water for 15 mins, then strained into the boil, and steeped again with a second lot of water. Topped boil to 5L, added 500g LDME 4 cloves. Boiled for 30 mins, then added the juice and skins of the fruit for another 30 mins. Dissolved the remaining sugars and strained into the fermenter, pitched yeast.

1kg of fresh ginger
2kg raw sugar
3 lemons
250g lactose
8 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
champagne yeast
23L

I have a more recent version that uses 50% more ginger and it was old ginger (left in the fridge for > 1 month which makes it more potent) and its got the real kick that i was after so i suggest upping the ginger to 1.5kg for this recipe. My next experiment will be subbing half the raw sugar for LDME and adding 250g of light crystal malt for some added sweetness. This one is a work in progress but its on its way. The recipe above will give you an alcoholic ginger lemonade type drink thats very dry but very refreshing and not being malty you can drink it like water!