October 15th, 2008 -- The MBS Porter Kit

On Sunday, then, I sprang out of bed at my customary time of 6:00am. It was like Christmas morning. I threw on a jacket, jumped in my car, and sped over to the Powderhorn Brewery.

The place was silent when I arrived. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The mice would arrive later. I made myself some coffee, brought the Times in from outside, and waited for the shuffling from upstairs.

After working through Week in Review, I brought up the brewing equipment and opened the Porter kit. Like a Christmas present. Below are the contents.

6lbs Dark LME
8oz Carapils
8oz Black Malt
1oz tradition hops
1oz Glacier hops
Muntons dry yeast [this is the same yeast we'd been using]

Now I got to the brewing journal transcription, which, somehow, fails to correspond with my memory. I don't know what we did for this whole day (we probably spent most of it arguing about something inane) but we didn't start brewing until the early evening. Some Christmas.

Onto the journal --

6:40pm
Begin to heat 1.5 gal water and specialty grain

7:20pm
Begin boiling malt extract in 3.25 gal water

8:28pm
Hot break? Added hops (Traditional) [did we brew this one inside? We definitely brewed indoors once during the fall, and the boil is never quite as energetic inside as it is on the turkey-frying burner, and so the question mark makes me think we brewed inside...]

9:13pm
Added finishing hops (Glacier); no hot break. [Must have been indoors...]

Sometime later in the pm
Pitched yeast, added cold water. OSG 1.039 [Jesus Christ, that's not much sugar. We also sucked at reading the hydrometer]

10/16
9:00am
Bubbling away

8:00pm
Still bubbling -- basement temp 62 degs

10/20
No bubbling -- stirred it up. Temp 52 degs. SG = 1.025

10/21
Moved beer upstairs (near heater) -- downstairs temp 55 degs

10/23
Reading all fucked up. Stirred a second time. Reading (before stirring) 1.028

10/25
Racked into carboy. 1.020

10/30
Reading 1.018
Tastes like flat porter, NOT too malty like previous batches [we were getting ahead of ourselves with this note]

10/31
Reading 1.018. Ready to bottle

11/1
Bottling results in 25 22-oz bottles and one 12-oz. Stored batch under kitchen table until ready.

Discovered that 5 oz priming sugar [the amount that comes in the kit] does NOT equal 3/4 cup, or what most books recommend for bottling.

[End Notes]
After letting it age for three weeks, we carried this beer to Thanksgiving, where the reviews were mixed. It wasn't as malty as previous batches (we settled on having used too much priming sugar in the bottling process as the reason for the extra sweetness), but it also wasn't as rick in flavor as most porters tend to be. Nonetheless, with 15 friends sitting around a bonfire in the cold northern Wisconsin night, it was pretty popular. We managed to bring 8-10 bombers back home with us, where they have remained, being consumed very slowly, until this day.

There is one final note in the brewing journal: January 18th -- Tastes goddamn delicious.

A couple of months of aging, apparently, does wonders...