Colonial Honey Porter

This is based on a recipe for Colonial Honey Porter in the Brewmaster's Bible:

• 6 lbs. light malt extract
• 3/4 lb. Munich malt (cracked)
• 1 lb. medium crystal malt (cracked)
• 6 oz. black malt (cracked)
• 3 oz. chocolate malt (cracked)
• 1 lb. honey
• 10 HBU's bittering hops (Cluster or similar type)
• 1/2 oz. Mt. Hood, Liberty, or Hallertauer aroma hops
• 10-14 grams dry ale yeast or Wyeast 1028, 1084, 1056, or 1098
• 3/4 cup corn sugar for bottling

Nothing is ever perfect, so I had to make some subsitutions at the home brew shop. They had all the grains I needed, but they were out of Cluster hops, so they recommended Northern Brewer as a replacement. I needed 10 HBU's -- what the heck is that?

There's a good explanation here, but HBU's are Homebrew Bittering Units. To put it simply, the HBU's are computed by multiplying the alpha acid percentage of the hops by the number of ounces. If you needed 10 HBU's and the alpha acid percentage of your hops was 5%, you would need 2 ounces (5 percent times 2 ounces = 10 HBU's). The alpha acid percentage for Northern Brewer whole hops was 7%, so I used 1.42 ounces -- well, I rounded it up to 1.5.

I also chose an excellent yeast from White Labs: the British Ale Yeast.

After that, I did the following:

• Put about 3 gallons of water in my kettle, suspending the cracked grains in a hops bag until the water just began to boil (the wort was quite dark at that point)
• Stirred in the malt extract and the honey -- kept stirring for a few minutes to make sure it dissolved into the boiling water
• When the wort was boiling again, I added half of the Northern Brewer bittering hops (suspended in a hops bag)
• After 15 minutes of boiling, I added the second half of the Northern Brewer bittering hops.
• After 15 more minutes, I added a teaspoon of Irish Moss
• After 15 more minutes, I added the aroma hops and turned off the heat.
• 15 minutes later, I transferred the wort to a 6-gallon carboy and added cold bottled water to the carboy until it the liquid was 12 inches high (which is 5 gallons in my carboys)
• At that point, the liquid in the fermenter was the right temperature for the yeast, so I poured that in, put on the airlock, and began the long wait.

As I write this, this batch is bubbling nicely in primary fermentation. I'll report back in a couple of weeks with the verdict. This batch has a can't-go-wrong feel to it. Posted by Chad Dickerson at July 28, 2004 10:11 PM