Sweet Oatmeal Porter

It was a day off work, so what better to do than brew up a nice batch.  I actually had to hold back on this one a bit to wait for my bottle supply to build up enough to bottle this batch when the time is ready.  It turns out that between traveling and the holidays that I have been quite a bit behind on my consumption rate.

So today’s brew is a sweet oatmeal porter that consists of:
5 lbs Dark DME
1 cup English Black Patent Malt
2 cups Crystal 120L
2 cups Flaked oats
1.25 oz Brewers gold pellet hops (bittering, 60 minute) (6.4 alpha)
0.5 oz Cascade whole hops (aromatic, 2 minute) (5.8 alpha)

This batch followed the recurring theme, dissolved the DME into 2 gallons of water over about 20 minutes.  Added the speciality malts for 20 minutes and heated to about 150 degrees F before adjusting the heat up to boiling.  Once boiling was attained I pulled the malts out of the wort and added the bittering hops to the boil.  I placed the malts in a strainer over the brew pot to allow any remaining liquid to drain down into the wort.  After 35 minutes I added a whirfloc tablet for clarification and continued the boil for another 25 minutes.  With 2 minutes left in the boil I added the aromatic hops. 

As soon as the boil was finished I removed the brewpot from the heat and placed it into an ice bath.  At the same time I removed the hops and placed the hop bags into the strainer over the brew pot.  (I had already tossed the speciality malts out.)  After about 20 minutes in the ice bath the temperature of the wort had cooled to around 100 degrees F.  Since brew day was a colder day I tested the temp of the water being used to bring my total volume up.  The combination of the 3 gallons of cold water with the 2 gallons of wort would give me a average temperature of roughly 65 degrees F.  Not wanting my wort to cool too much I pulled the brewpot out of the ice bath and poured the brewpot into the primary which had already been filled up to about 2 gallons with water.  I then topped the primary off at 5 gallons and pitched the yeast with a good vigorous stir to fully aerate the wort.

The initial SG of this brew was right on target at 1.051.  After 16 hours fermentation hadn’t yet started but thankfully when I returned from a weekend away the airlock was bubbling nicely.  I racked to the secondary on the 4th day.  By the time I racked the SG had dropped to 1.014 which was already within the target range for final SG.  Hopefully after another few days in the secondary this one will be ready to bottle and gear up for conditioning.