Brewing 2 Porters! One Robust, One Blackberry
It’s at this time of year that I tend to get overwhelmed by the number of lighter summer beers that I brew and begin wanting something darker and maltier to contrast with them. After the hoppier and crisper beers that I have brewed recently I end up neglecting the darker more robust beers and this starts me off thinking about brewing something a bit more complex
Experimenting with Porters
I have always loved Porters and it’s not a beer you can readily get when you walk into a pub in my home town so it’s always nice brewing one. The other great thing is although I don’t really brew to style, porters do cover a whole range of flavours and strengths from robust to Baltic. It really opens up a whole load of possibilities when it comes to designing a recipe. One thing I have noticed a lot of is fruit porters and it seems the style is perfectly suited to a variety of fruits, namely dark fruits like plums and blueberries. The one thing I have to hand however is blackberries which grow in abundance right outside my house. Although I don’t think they will add a whole load of flavour which is why I have a plan to make them a bigger and bolder part of the beer.
The Porter Plan
My intention is to split my brew into 2 and ferment each half separately. One will be a regular robust porter and have no additions and the other will have a concentrated blackberry syrup created by boiling the blackberries in a little water until they breakdown and reduce by half. It is with this concentrated syrup that I hope to pack a whole load of flavour in a relatively small addition to the fermenter. This means less beer is wasted as would be the case if you add large amounts of fruit to the fermenter.
The reason for splitting the batch is because I don’t really want a whole load of fruit beer and it means I can get 2 different beers out of one brew day. If you wanted to you could add fruit to the whole batch but I tend to find to much becomes too much after a while and I don’t really want it hanging around for too long.
The Recipe
Batch Size: 19 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.056
Final Gravity: 1.014
ABV: 5.4%
Bitterness (IBU): 31.7
Est. Colour (EBU): 55.3
| Amount | Item | Type | % or IBU |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.75 kg | Pale Malt, Maris Otter | Grain | 82.78% |
| 0.40 kg | Munich Malt | Grain | 8.83% |
| 0.30 kg | Chocolate Malt | Grain | 6.62% |
| 0.08 kg | Special B Malt | Grain | 1.77% |
| 19.00 gm | First Gold [7.50 %] | Hops | 17.4 IBU |
| 24.00 gm | Bullion [8.00 %] | Hops | 14.2 IBU |
| 1 Pkgs | SafAle English Ale S-04 | Yeast-Ale |
Malt: Like always I want the recipe to be fairly simple but have large amounts of flavour to balance out the fruit in one half of the beer. With a Porter you can go one or two ways by either choosing darker more bitter malts or less kilned more carmel malts. I have chosen a more toffee like grain bill to balance out the fruit rather than bitterness.
Hops: For the hops I have again just balanced out the malt rather than gone for any hop aroma that will likely clash with the fruit so gone with good old English hops to provide bitterness.
Yeast: Yeast is a packet of dry S-05 which I have handy anyway.
