#IHP2014 - Brewday

I like to start my brewdays early, usually mashing in around 7am and getting through the whole of my brewing by midday. Saturday was no different, other than the blanket of snow on the ground, and the fact that the beer being brewed wasn't a product of my imagination. This weekend I brewed a recreation of a porter that was brewed in 1834, at the St. Stephen's brewery in Norwich, as part of the International Homebrew Project.

I tinkered a little with the recipe, going with a blend of pale malts, and having to use from extra light malt extract as my mash tun is tiny and only produces 3 gallons of 1.042 wort. In the end my recipe looked like this:

• 2lbs Extra Light DME
• 1.25lbs Brown malt
• 1lb Maris Otter
• 1lb Golden Promise
• 0.4lb Black malt
• 1.5oz Fuggles for 95 minutes
• 0.5oz Fuggles for 35 minutes
• Wyeast 1968 London ESB

Everything went swimmingly, perhaps a tad too swimmingly as I ended up with a 17°P wort rather than the expected 16°P, but a little extra booze never hurt anyone, right?

I will let the yeast do its thing for the next couple of weeks, before bottling and letting it sit for 3 weeks and then do a full write up on the beer itself at the end of March, and if it tastes as great as it smelt during the brewday, then I am in for a treat!