Revolution of the Beer 1000 brews a porter

Sea Cliff NY-

On November 8, Revolution of the Beer 1000 met again in Sea Cliff to brew its third beer. After a brown ale and belgian wit, we decided to brew a brown porter using an all grain kit bought from Austin Homebrew Supply. This account will not be as detailed as Mike's breakfast stout but I will give you some of the basics. Our total grains weighed 10 1/2 lbs. 9 lbs was Marris Otter, 4oz chocolate malt, 40z black patent. 2 oz of hops were added, 1oz of challenger and 1oz of kent golding.

We only have a 5 gallon mash tun so we had to sparge a few times because the grain took up so much room in the mash. Our mash tun has an interesting set up that was suggested to us by the owner of Lark Homebrew. We took a short piece of copper piping and made cuts about 3/4 of an inch apart. We then took the screen part of a small strainer and clamped it around the copper. It is not a good as a false bottom but it seems to be holding up well and is easy to clean.


Since our last brew had over a gallon boil off during boiling we increased the amount of water to 7 gallons since we didn't want to add any chlorinated water from the tap that would slow down our yeast. Unfortunately we still ended up with almost 6 gallons and don't have a hydrometer so we don't know how far off the target specific gravity we are. The wort had a nice dark color and smelled delicious.

Since we had so much wort and no wort chiller it took us a while and a lot of ice but it eventually came down. When pouring the wort into our fermentation bucket we had a small spill and lost a bit of that extra wort. Now two and a half weeks later it looks like the fermentation went well and we will be bottling tomorrow.