White House Honey Porter - first extract beer

kr1tya3 · Jan 11, 2013

After a few months of brewing kits, I have decided to take the next step: extract brewing. And my beer of choice is the White House Honey Porter extract pack, by brewuk: http://www.brewuk.co.uk/store/white-hou ... -pack.html

I got the package a few days ago, but I'll only have time for it on the weekend. The stuff is amazing, I can smell the hops through the thick plastic! I am really excited about it and if I'm not too lazy, I'll post some pictures. Has anyone else brewed this beer before? Not necessarily the brewuk kit, but maybe from individual ingredients? Although previously I usually brewed kits short to 20L from the 23, I'm actually thinking about bringing this to 20L from the recommended 19. Any thoughts on that?

pittsy · Jan 11, 2013

Hi , no i haven't brewed this beer before but i have done extract and you should be nicely pleased with the results . I was gonna suggest brewing it with more liquid as 7.6% is very strong for a beer , i would try to aim for around 6% but that's just me , good luck and have fun.

johnnyh · Jan 12, 2013

I've been looking at an extract kit from Brewuk they say it can be made with a 10 litre pot.... Is this true? What are you going to use? Would be very interested in what the instructions say/your experience.

mmaguy41 · Jan 12, 2013

10 litre pot is the minimum required, the more volume you can boil the better.

johnnyh · Jan 12, 2013

So a15 to 20 litre pot would sort me for extract brewing ?

Looking forward to hearing more on this

kr1tya3 · Jan 12, 2013

So the brewing part is finished, the stuff is in the fermenter now. I did do a few mistakes unfortunately though. The first one was that even though I had a muslin bag, I decided to add the hops directly to the wort. I figured that I would run the wort through a strainer, and filter out the hops that way. Given how clumsy I am, it was a recipe for disaster... The strainer got full really quickly and the wort started splashing everywhere. I didn't lose too much though, but a fair amount of swearing followed. In the end I just let some hops slip into the fermenter along with the wort. That shouldn't cause any problems, right?

The second mistake I did was that I accidentally topped up the fermenter a little high. I planned to brew 20L, but since I lost a little wort in the splashing, I figured that I would follow the recipe and do 19. Well in the end I'm doing just a little over 20L. I hope it will not taste too watery.

OG came to 1058. The recipe says OG should be around 1073, so I'm a little worried about the end result. However when I tasted the sample I took for the gravity reading, it tasted good. The smell during the brew btw was absolutely amazing, so I'm going into this with some mixed feelings. I think I brewed a great beer, but I'm a bit scared about the consequences of my screwups.

Oh and to answer the question, I brewed using a 11L stock pot.