Last weekend I brewed my first batch of beer for the year, a porter, and I thought it would be interesting to document my brewing process and share the recipe. (Actually I brewed two batches on the same day, but this post focuses on the first.) The beer is Glass Butte Porter, something of a Deschutes Brewery Black Butte Porter clone recipe based on details I found in a circa-2000 issue of Brew Your Own magazine. You’ll find my recipe at the end of this article.

I’m not getting into the nitty gritty of the mashing process or anything too technical, as much as just sharing how I brew and little tricks I’ve learned along the way.

Jump to: Background, Brew Day!, Recipe

Background

I’m an all grain homebrewer, and I use the batch sparge method. This is a method that resides somewhere between brew-in-a-bag and fly sparging on the all grain scale. “Sparging” refers to the process of rinsing the grains with hot water to release and extract as much of the sugars as possible. Here’s a quick summary of the three methods I just mentioned to get an idea of how they compare:

• Fly sparge: A (minimum) two vessel setup, one for the mash (the grain) and another for hot water. Once the mash is done (typically after one hour), you start to drain off the wort while adding the hot water to it, which gradually rinses the grain until you get the amount of wort you need. This is generally the most efficient method for maximizing extraction.
• Batch sparge: Only one vessel needed, for the mash. Your water is split into two batches: the first for the mash, the second for the rinse. Once the mash is complete, you drain the wort completely, then add the second batch of hot water to steep and rinse the remaining sugars. This is less efficient that fly sparging, so you need to use more grain to make up for it.
• Brew-in-a-bag: You could call this the “no sparge” method, in which you have a mesh bag that holds the grains and steeps in your kettle of hot water. Once the mash is complete the bag is extracted and drained (and sometimes could be additionally rinsed with hot water as well). You use the full volume of water you need all at once, and this is usually the least efficient method so again, more grains are used to compensate.

I developed my batch sparge process based on the description in John Palmer’s How To Brew, using his formulas to calculate grain amounts to build a custom spreadsheet that I use in all my recipes.

My system is also optimized for both simplicity and for brewing outdoors; here’s a quick rundown of my main equipment (not counting smaller items like spoons, funnels, siphon hoses, etc.):

• Cinderblock bricks to stack and hold things
• Propane burner and tank
• 10 gallon mash tun (a Home Depot insulated water cooler)
• 10 gallon pot with valve and thermometer
• 2 additional pots for water, wort collection (7.5 gallon and 5 gallon)
• Copper immersion chiller
• Garden hoses for the chiller

Brew Day!

I don’t often brew in winter because my setup is best used outdoors, which means the back patio. However I’ve long considered the possibility of setting up in the garage to brew; the main considerations with doing that are making sure the doors are open (at least partway) for proper venting, and running hoses for chilling. The weather was in the mid-30s and it was lightly snowy so I decided to try the garage.

Setup was virtually the same, except for hose placement for the chiller. On the patio, I run a hose from a faucet to the chiller (cold water intake), and another from the chiller to over the fence (hot water out). In the garage, I ran the intake hose from the hose bib just outside the mandoor, and the drain hose went out the main garage door to the street so it could runoff into the storm drain.

My first step of the brew day was to heat two gallons of water to boiling; this goes into the mash tun to both sterilize and preheat it. I find I hit my target mash temperatures much better by preheating this way.

Once the tun was preheating, I starting heating my strike water. While that was going, I milled my grain on my grain mill (powered by electric drill). In fact, I double grind all my grain when I’m milling at home; it breaks up the malt to a finer grind which helps extraction. This is an important step especially if you have some undermodified malts.

Mash in! I was targeting a temperature of 154°F for the mash, so I heated the mash water to 167°. My spreadsheet actually told me 162.8° using a grain temperature of 70°, but since it was only about 55° in the garage I bumped that up. Mashing in is pretty simple in my case: dump the hot water from the mash tun, then add the mash water (I use a smaller pot with a handle to scoop the water into the tun) and alternate with grain and water, stirring as constantly as I can.

Once the hot water and malt are all combined, I drop in my floating thermometer and close up the lid.

This is also the time I prep my yeast, if I’m using the Wyeast liquid “smack packs.” I’ve found that smacking the pack to break the inner pod gives you around three hours before you’re ready to pitch it, giving it enough time to activate the yeast and swell the pack.

I find this insulated cooler does a great job of holding temperature, even if the ambient temp around it is relatively cool. At most, it might lose a degree or two over the hour or so (probably depending on how often it’s opened). I will check the temperature at the 15 minute mark, then 30 minutes (at which time I also typically give the mash a stir), and then at one hour when it’s time to start the runoff.

During the last 10 to 15 minutes or so of the mash, I’ll start heating my next batch of water to rinse the grains. My goal here is to land around 168° to 170° for the sparge water, and this typically raises the mash to about 158-159° or so for the mashout.

While that water is heating, the next step is the vorlauf—recirculation of the wort to help set the grain bed and clarify the wort. My process is pretty basic: run the wort off into a quart-size measuring cup, pour it back onto the top of the mash. I usually do this for 10-12 quarts until I’m satisfied that it’s clear enough.

Next I run the wort off into the kettle. I should end up with four gallons on the first batch, and four on the next; yes, that means I do an eight gallon boil. I don’t know if it’s the dry high desert climate or what, but I lose at least two gallons to evaporation and there’s always at least a half gallon absorbed by hop material and in trub, so I end up with five to five and a half gallons by the end of the boil.

Next batch of hot water goes into the mash tun after I’ve run off the first batch of wort—four more gallons at about 170°, which I let steep for another 15 minutes. (Don’t forget the thermometer!) At the end of that time, I repeat the process of the first batch: vorlauf, then drain the wort. That gets added to the main pot to bring my total up to eight gallons.

At this point I’ll take a gravity reading of the wort (the boil gravity) just to ensure things are on track. My spreadsheet’s batch sparge calculations include the predicted boil gravity, and somehow my actual number almost always comes in higher than this calculation—which is a good thing.

By now I’ve got my wort in the pot and I’m waiting for it to come to a boil.

Once the temperature rises above 190° or so, I start to skim off the hot break, which is the thick, brownish foam that forms on the surface. The hot break consists of the various proteins, polyphenols, dust particles, and so on that coagulate out of the wort during the boil. I skim this foam for several reasons: to help reduce the chance of boilover; to have a cleaner boil with less particulate matter which (I suspect) leads to better overall fermentation and beer; and because the foam kind of bugs me.

The boil usually gets rolling while I’m skimming, and I let it go a few minutes to continue to skim off any additional hot break and to watch for signs of potential boilover. Once I’m satisfied, it’s time to add the hops, and start my timer for (in this case) 60 minutes!

Yes, for some of these recipes I still boil my bittering hops through the full boil, particularly for darker beers with less overall IBUs. I know the current trend in hop additions, especially with hop-forward styles, is for later additions to minimize any harsh bitterness and vegetal flavors, and these days when I brew an IPA I cut the hop additions down to no more than 30 minutes of boil and then a bunch in the finish. But for these less hoppy styles, I’m old fashioned.

Also I should note: there’s a lot of waiting during the brew day, between short bursts of activity. Waiting an hour for the mash; another hour for the boil; heating water, cooling wort; and so on. During those times I’m usually busy cleaning and prepping equipment and have everything ready to go. On this particular day, I sanitized a carboy and other equipment (with StarSan), cleaned another carboy with PBW along with two kegs, and mostly stayed on top of washing various pots and equipment to minimize the amount of post-brew cleanup I’d need to do.

When there was 15 minutes left in the boil, I put my copper immersion chiller into it to sterilize. I’d already rinsed off the chiller and made sure there was nothing on it that would get into the beer. Then at the 10 minute mark, I added some yeast nutrient (half a teaspoon dissolved in warm water), not strictly necessary but I’d won a tube of it at a homebrew club meeting so I’ve been using it.

The last minute or so, I added my aroma hop addition, one ounce of Tettnang pellets.

Then it was time to kill the heat, hook up the hoses to the chiller, and get it cooled down.

This particular immersion chiller is The Hydra™, sold by JaDeD Brewing, and is billed as the fastest immersion chiller on the market—and I believe it. In my experience it will cool the wort from boiling to 68° in just under 20 minutes on a regular brew day (meaning, warm outside), and on this day in the garage, it dropped it to temp in about 13 minutes. It’s pretty amazing, actually, and well worth the investment.

At that point, all I had left was to transfer the wort to the carboy, take a gravity reading, pitch yeast, and clean up. (At least on a brew day where I’m only brewing one beer; last weekend, as I said, I actually did another one immediately afterwards.)

My gravity hit the mark, 1.056 on a calculated target of 1.054, yeast was pitched, and the beer was happily fermenting away by the next morning.

The Recipe

“Glass Butte Porter” is my Black Butte Porter clone (or homage is a better term) that I based on a recipe guideline from the March 2001 issue of BYO. In it was a feature called Recipe Exchange that featured “Replicator” recipes, with brewing guidelines from the brewers themselves. A reader asked about Black Butte Porter, and then-Deschutes brewmaster Dr. Bill Pengelly offered details on brewing a clone version at home.

I formulated my recipe based on those notes, with a few tweaks and adjustments I’ve made over the years (the flaked barley is new this time around), and all in all it’s a pretty good recipe. I’ve gone a little more traditional with my hops—I didn’t use Cascade this time—and my mash temperature of 154° with this batch is higher than I usually go, but I wanted to build a bit more body in unfermentable dextrins.

Incidentally, Glass Buttes are a group of volcanic mountains located in Central Oregon, between Bend and Burns. They are named for the large amounts of obsidian glass deposits found on the slopes.

My recipe targets were an original gravity of around 1.053, IBUs around 30, and a mash temperature of 154°. Here’s the base all grain recipe:

Ingredients

• 7.5 pounds American two-row malt
• 0.5 pounds Crystal malt, 60° Lovibond
• 0.33 pounds chocolate malt, 350°L
• 0.25 pounds dark chocolate malt, 420°L
• 0.25 pounds flaked barley
• 2 ounces Golding hops for 60 minutes – 9.7 AAU
• 1 ounce Tettnang hops for 1-5 minutes / aroma – 6 AAU
• Wyeast 1028 London Ale

Brew according to your usual all grain methods.

One thing to note on my hops, and IBU calculations. I listed the AAU in the ingredients so you can calculate your own recipe based on the hops and alpha acid percentage they contain. In my case, the original listed alpha acids were 5.6% and 3.2%, respectively. However, over the past year or so I’ve taken to adjusting these AA% numbers down in my recipes, according to conversations I’ve had with my friend Mark. Essentially, no matter how good you store hops, they will degrade, and some current numbers suggest the AA% degrades roughly 20% per year of age.

So I’ve started incorporating that figure into my alpha acid calculations, which factors into the IBUs. When I get hops from the Brew Shop, if they don’t have a year on the label, I assume they are last year’s hops. Based on that, I multiply the AA% by 0.8 to come up with a revised number. If more than one year old, the formula will look more like:

(((AA% * 0.8) * 0.8) * 0.8)
       ^1yr   ^2yrs  ^3yrs

And so on. The results are empirical—I don’t the equipment or opportunity to analyze my beers for true IBU numbers—but in flavor and overall sensory result, I think this works quite well.

Finally, I outlined my process above, and here are my notes from the brew day, scribbled on my spreadsheet: