Porter Advice

consider british crystal instead of regular crystal.
considerflaked oats or flaked barley for head retention.
consider using both dark and light munich

 

Unless brewing an American Stout/Porter

 

10 gal batch

16 lb Pale Ale malt
4 lb Brown malt
1 lb Simpsons Dark Crystal
1 lb Simpsons Extra Dark Crystal
1 lb Chocolate Wheat
2 lb Pale Chocolate
1 lb Chocolate

Bittering hop of choice.
Northern Brewer @15 min
EKG and/or Fuggle @ 5 min
Target 25-30 IBU

WY 1028 yeast

 

There is a huge range of "porters" everything from dark brown ales to stouts. Some would argue that there is no real difference between a porter and a stout. So, you might get better answers if you can point to a commercial porter that you like.

With all that said, it is hard to beat something like Taddy Porter, I don't know if @kellyst's recipe above will clone it, but I'll bet it makes a tasty porter The English malts are key, don't sub American caramel malts for the Simpsons and find some British chocolate malts as well.

 

If you moved to Minnesota then you'd be in the mood for porters ten months out of the year

 

I have a pretty dang good Porter recipe here on the site.

Pale chocolate and regular chocolate lend a nice toasty and roasty balance.

I'm about to brew a Porter myself. With chocolate and desiccated coconut and aged in a rum barrel!

 

My best porter, which became one of my standard brews after dialing in the recipe in around 25 years ago , is basically as follows:

53% pale ale malt
8.8% brown malt
8.8% CaraAroma malt
4.4% Melanoidin or Honey malt (either one or a combo)
2.2% CaraMunich
1.1% Carafa III Special
1.7% Wheat Malt (or a combo of wheat malt and flaked oats)
15.6% #3 invert sugar
4.4% blackstrap molasses. For the hops, a combination of Cluster and Bullions totaling no more than 39 IBUs (all added at beginning of the boil).
For the yeast, any variation of Siebel BRY97 (ie., the original Ballantine Ale yeast, also available as Wyeast 1272 and dry as Danstar BRY97).
Ferment per usual procedure, and bulk age for at least 8-16 weeks (though 36-52 weeks is ideal and more towards traditional Porter character). Dry hop it if you must, but if you want a traditional, an old school porter would not have much noticeable dry hop character (but it's your beer, so tradition be damned).
I altogether skip the chocolate malt which some porter recipes call for ...I don't like the character which it adds. Just my personal preference.
As far as the aging goes, as with many other traditional old school beers...it makes a huge difference, and it's well worth the wait.
Brew extra so you can enjoy some right away, but the revel in the difference in flavor of a well matured batch (something which too many homebrewers and craft brewers seem to miss out on as a result of all the hype over "freshness").
Once you have a properly andd traditionally aged example, you'll want to brew a double or triple batch

 

What do you want your porter to taste like? it's a very wide-open category at this point and there's really no such thing as a "normal" porter unless you view it traditional and want to brew a 19th century London recipe which is really the most primal porter that you can brew with modern ingredients.

 

Has anyone else boiled flaked malts before? I'm curious to know what you get out of this.

 

I don't have all the specs to run this through BrewCipher (mash time, length?), but given the grain bill (38% specialty malts including the brown malt), I'm not surprised.

 

My porters with 1028 usually finish between 1.015 and 1.020, so that doesn't sound far off.

 

This is a timely thread since I'm thinking about brewing a porter in the next couple of weeks but haven't decided on a recipe. I'm thinking about going with a mix of pale ale, brown and black malt. I'm wondering how much black malt to use however. Is there a percentage of black malt relative to the overall grist which would be typical, and a limit which would be unwise to go beyond? I'm looking at a lower gravity porter at around 13.5-14% plato.

 

Patrik, for your consideration below is what Jamil Zainasheff suggests for a 12.8 °P Brown Porter (English style Porter) in the book Brewing Classic Styles:

· English Pale Malt: 9.5 lbs.

· Brown Malt: 1 lb.

· Crystal (40 °L): 1 lb.

· Chocolate Malt (350 °L): 10 ounces

Maybe just bump up the values above in the same proportions to achieve the OG you desire.

Cheers!

 

Thanks alot for the suggestion Jack. When I type in the proportions in the brewersfriend calculator (using the best approximations as far as ingredients go) to match the gravity I get a color value of 23 SRM which seems light colored to me (going by the value and the color sample), but maybe I'm interpreting the value and the corresponding color incorrectly, and maybe the calculator is flawed. I'm wanting the beer to be dark like a typical porter, say a Fuller's London Porter, but I find it hard to get the color I'm expecting using the calculator without using a proportion of black malt which seems excessive.

 

Jamil lists 24 SRM in the book. I suppose I should have emphasized the Brown when I stated Brown Porter.

If you want to darken your beer up you can augment the grain bill with some Black Malt. When I homebrew my Oatmeal Stout I use 1/4 lb. of Black Malt in that batch. Maybe try adding 1/4 lb. of Black Malt to your grain bill in Brewers Friend and see what color (SRM) you get. I personally have never exceeded a quantity of 1/4 lb. of Black Malt in any of the beers I have brewed. Some folks report they are sensitive to the qualities that Black Malt provides using descriptors like "acrid" and "burnt" to describe it.

Maybe this article will be helpful to you: http://byo.com/hops/item/155-back-in-black-the-truth-about-black-patent-malt

Cheers!

 

I think it is me who needs to revise my understanding of color charts and how they relate to beer color. My concern was that the beer would end up looking like a brown ale more so than a porter, but the end result might be dark enough. Below is a couple of snaps of a Swedish brewing log book from 1916 of a brew of porter which used 1600kg malt for 49 hectoliters of wort of 18.3% P. The note to the furthest right notes that it used 1000 kg of "köpmalt" or "bought malt" from Widén, so I'm assuming a basemalt (could be pilsner, could be a vienna type malt, the two types used for Swedish lager beer at the time), and then 100 kg of svartmalt (black malt) and 100kg of karamellmalt (caramel malt, unknown degree of roasting), and 12 kg of crulör (weird spelling unless some type of brand name is being referred to, of what I'm assuming is a sugar colorant [kulör] of unknown coloring strength).




As per brewersfriend this would put the black malt at 6.3% of the total grist and the caramel malt at the same percentage. Then again this brewery used to age their porter for over a year in the years prior to this log, so any astringency might be lost over time.

 

That is an important consideration. I personally prefer my Oatmeal Stout after few months of aging. Black Malt is about 2.5% of the grain bill.

Cheers!