Willie's Helles Lager, Big Bad Baltic Porter, and some Hoppy Ale Updates

So as usual I have procrastinated on my brewing updates.  Unfortunately this won't be a long post for two reasons:

1. I took crappy notes when I brewed Willie's Helles Lager so that will be a paragraph and pictures.
2. My Baltic Porter was a complete last minute decision (decided yesterday to brew it today) so I am writing this blog not three hours removed from pitching the yeast and I am tired and not in the mood to type as much as usual.

Willie's Helles is a lager recipe I got from my brother Willie.  I won't even go into details on the recipe instead I will direct you to his blog post where he discusses making it, click here. The only difference between his recipe and my attempt was water and a decoction mash.  This was my first try at a decoction mash and I can safely say that I won't be making it a habit.  It was a lot of work!  I got to break in brother Mark's gift of a brew paddle for all the intense decoction boils.  The brewday went relatively smoothly but I was so busy decocting that I hardly took notes or got pics.  It has been three weeks since I brewed and I racked it to secondary yesterday.  OG of 1.069 to a racking gravity of 1.017.  It was sweeter that I had hoped in an odd 'macro' corn way.  I hope some time in secondary mellows it out and brings the gravity down another point or two to dry it up.

Stir the mash

Stir the decoction

Still stir the decoction

The spent grain looks a little more spent after a decoction mash

Racking from primary to secondary.

So Willie's lager was fermented with the same German Lager yeast I used for my German Pils (which I will be bottling in a week).  I wanted to resuse the yeast one last time before throwing it out and I thought I better go big or go home.

So I brewed a Baltic Porter.  Originally I was aiming for a 3 gallon batch at 1.090 OG.  But then I got carried away.  More on that later.  Here is the recipe:

7.5# Munich
5# German Pilsner
0.5# Crystal 60L
0.5# Belgian Special 'B'
6 oz. Debittered Black Malt
0.25# Chocolate Malt

1# Light DME added to preboil volume.

3.5oz of Czech Saaz (3.0 AA) at 60 min
1.3oz of Czech Saaz (3.0 AA) at 15 min

With my original intentions of a 3 gallon batch I decided to try my hand at a 'Brew-in-a-Bag' method of brewing.  This is basically an easier way to do all-grain brewing with the trade-off being slightly lower efficiency and typically smaller batch sizes.  The concept is easy, put your grains in bag and soak them in water at the appropriate temp (think super big tea bag steeping) for an hour before draining off the grain and proceeding with brewday as usual.  I decided to make it more complicated.  I couldn't handle the idea of a lower efficiency (mainly because I didn't plan for it in my grain bill) so I decided to insert my copper manifold under my grain bag so that I could sparge extra sugars off the grain into the boil kettle.  What I ended up with was 8.5 gallons of wort that when boiled to 4.25 gallons (50% reduction yikes!) would yield the desired 1.090 OG.  But then I figured 'what the heck' and added the aforementioned pound of light dry malt extract to boost me to a projected 4.25 gallons at 1.100 OG.  INSANE!

Obviously the longest part of this brewday was the boil.  It took about 2 hours to boil the wort down to a point where I could start the hop additions and proceed with brewday.

I hit my targets and the beer is currently sitting in my fridge at 53F and will stay there for at least a couple of weeks before I bring it out to room temp to finish fermentation.  Sorry for the lack of pics...it was another busy brewday and my pretty little helper wasn't here to snap pics.

Grains. In a bag.

Bag of grains.  In a pot of hot water.

Racking the sweet sweet wort to the primary fermentor.

So for new brews that's all the news I have.  The two ales I have brewed this year (Two Hearted Ale Clone and Pig Trail Ale 2) have been in the bottle for a few weeks now and this weekend I got to give them a taste.  I won't offer too much of my opinion but all in all I am quite happy with how these turned out.  I am interested to see what my brewin brothers and sisters think of them next time we Skype.

PTA2 on the left.  2<3 2 on the right.

With all the busy business of this past weekend I even had time to run my truck through a car wash....she needed a bath!

I hope you enjoyed the post.  Talk to you all soon!