Comments & Opinions? 1744 Porter attempt.

[C38368]

Morning all!

Last week I decided to try the 1744 Porter recipe in the November issue of BYO. It looked good, and I love trying to make old beers. For those that don't have the recipe handy, it calls for 12.25 lbs of 2-row, 2 lbs each of amber and brown malt, and about 13 ounces of patent malt. Hops are supposed to be Columbus (1 oz @ 12.4%), for about 37 IBUs. Wyeast 1098 British Yeast. Estimated OG/FG of 1.085/1.022.

Everything went OK, except for amber malt. Nobody nearby had it, but someone did suggest that I could substitute... aromatic malt! Now, I did this, because I didn't want to wait. Then I got home and looked into aromatic malt... doesn't really seem like a good substitute, but whatever. I had two pounds of the stuff, milled with everything else.

So I brewed it up anyway.

Based on what I've read, aromatic can be overwhelming when used in such quantities. Now, I'm not sure exactly how that expresses itself, but I'd wound up with an ounce of Columbus hops with a mere 19.4% AA content! I didn't use the full ounce, but I did bump the IBUs, by quite a bit, to around 52. It was a shot in the dark, but I was hoping that would help offset any overwhelming aromatic character.

That was five days ago.

I took my first gravity reading today: 1.018. More attenuated than it should be, but probably on point (my mash tun and HLT are both 10 gallon coolers, and I neglected to pre-heat either, so I suspect that I may not have hit my target mash temp of 153ºF). That's ok.

At this point, there's malt, and it might have sort of Belgian character to it. Or that might be my mind playing tricks on me. Bitterness is definitely there, but no flavor or aroma. I'm pretty happy with what I've got so far, but it seems to be lacking at burnt/coffee/chocolate/roasty character, at least at this point.

Wow, that was a lot of talking. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Seems like a good candidate for some aging, though it's hardly undrinkable, even now. Was the use of aromatic a mistake, or could this be serendipitous? Any chance of getting more character out of the patent malt as time goes on?

It's a very pretty color...

 

[buzzerj]

Yeah I think you added a bit more aromatic malt than I'd suggest 12% than a recommended <10% of the malt bill. It contributes about the same color as amber malt but you would note a flavor difference in a side by side taste. Crisp Amber malt is what you'd find most often and it would give the porter a more biscuity/toasty flavor than an aromatic malt. But I'm sure your result would still be a good beer (other than the hop bitterness trying to compensate for the aromatic content from the malt) but next time try to get the appropriate malts. I note that in the extract recipe BYO had they just used an amber liquid malt extract and a pale malt with a brown malt and a little (too much) black malt. That's always an option too. I would tend to modify this recipe to not go so high on the IBUs (30-35 at most) and use a more traditional British Goldings/Fuggles hops rather than the Columbus that the author chose. I'd employ the amber LME trick if I couldn't get amber malt and actually I'd not use 0.5 - 0.8 lbs of black malt (way too much). As the author said, the black malt was not to period anyway so I'd suggest using no black malt at all. Remember glasses to drink beer were not to period either in 1744. So I'd suggest you're making what your making, a brown porter which gains it's brown color from the brown malt. I'd also back off on the pale malt to target a 5.0% ABV to make it a Brown porter. No way in my mind would a 1744 working man's beer top out at 7.9% ABV. Even 5.0% is a stretch in my imagination. So what haven't I changed? Well a historical beer like this is open to a lot of interpretation since we don't have good records that far back. Who is to say my incarnation is not close either to what the real thing might have been? I think it's probably closer than your result with the aromatic malt and hops clash. But keep working on it. Porters are fascinating. Probably my favorite to brew.