Today's brewday was a bit of an education. The idea was to brew a lower gravity, hopped up version of the Bateman's Salem Porter recipe from the GW book.
70% Pale malt
10% Crystal 150
5% Roasted Barley
3% Chocolate wheat malt
12% Dextrose (brewing sugar)
40g Fuggle @40 mins
40g East Kent Goldings @10mins
10g Styrian Goldings @1mins
Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire
Mash 60 mins, Boil 60 mins, 31 IBU, OG 1.044, FG 1.009, ABV 4.5%
Mashed in at 67C more-or-less on the nose:
No problems there, the iodine test confirmed no starches remaining:
Hop pellets added during the boil as usual.
Skimmed off the hotbreak. Normally I don't bother but it had all coagulated in an eddy current around the hop bag and I couldn't resist it.
It all started getting a bit busy around 15 minutes. The dark grains that had been cold-steeping for a day were strained through a bag, sparged with a litre of water and hung to drip.
The dark wort was heated up in the pan to reduce the cooling effect of adding 2.5 litres to the main kettle and then poured in at around 10 minutes along with the dextrose.
Collected about 23 litres of wort after chilling quite rapidly with the immersion chiller. Thankfully the rain had stopped here so I didn't have to stand outside in the rain during the cleanup.
Unfortunately I missed my target gravity by 7 points. The actual OG was 1.038 from a target of 1.044 and I'm certain it's down to the cold steeping and related water additions.
The few posts I can find on the net about the subject do mention that you need to up your grain quantity to counter the less effective extraction that you get when cold steeping. I only hit an efficiency of 74% compared to my usual 80%. Lesson learned if I choose to cold-steep again. Looks like I'll get a 3.9% session 'porter' and the wort did taste very nice out of the sample jar. It's in the brewfridge at 20C and I'll up it to 21C and 22C over the next few days to ensure it attenuates well.
