This past Saturday was the September 2013 brew day for Dallas Homebrew Collective. We had about 10 people show up, and 4 batches of beer brewed. Two were extract and two were all grain. I got to watch a couple of our guys do their all grain batches and I’m more and more tempted to make the switch. However, with Saturday’s weirdo weather, I was able to finish up and re-pack everything in the truck before the torrents arrived.
I think for now, I will hold off on the all grain jump and spend the money on fishing out the kegging set-up. I have the chest freezer with a temperature controller. I have a used keg. And now I need tubes, a pressure regulator, and a charged CO2 tank. So I’m close to getting the kegging thing going.
For this month’s brew day, I brewed Brian Smith’s Prestidigitation Porter from BeerSmith. It started out with a 30-minute steep with chocolate malt. This steeping made the wort (can we call it that yet?) super dark right from the get go. The post-boil wort looks delicious already. I cannot wait to try this beer.
I couldn’t find the yeast that the recipe called for, so I used Wyeast 1275 – Thames Valley instead. The homebrew shop was sold out of perle hops too, so I subbed in UK Challenger. Lastly, I tossed in a few whole leaf cascade hops (from our garden) at 5 minutes. They might add a teeny tiny floral note. Overall, I think this will be a nice beer when it’s complete. Erin is trying to talk me in to making a hazelnut extract to go in when we move it to secondary. And I think that we should definitely do that.
In the video below, you can see the active fermentation already getting going. I over-filled a little bit – so there’s a little bit too much gunk coming out of the blowoff due to lack of headroom.
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