Thirsty Thursday: Porter Ahoy!

OK. I actually started this brew more than a week ago. But then suddenly… time passed, and I didn’t blog about it. What’s up with that?

So I started a porter two Sundays ago. A honey porter. This weekend, it’s due to be racked into the secondary fermenter (unless I do that today, of course).

This one was a new experience, because I had to steep some grains before starting the boil.

After steeping, it was time for the one-hour boil.

I can never quite understand how something that tastes so good can smell so bad in preparation.

One of the next challenges is to rapidly cool the unfermented beer, now called wort. Snow can be helpful for this.

Then the wort has to be moved from the kettle to the carboy for primary fermentation. This is never a pretty thing. But once it’s done, there’s a pretty thing.

Then the carboy is moved somewhere warm and dark and the yeast takes over. This porter bubbled hard for a few days then stopped, leaving a ring of mess on the inside of the carboy.

It’s time now to rack this beer – to move it from this 6-gallon carboy to a 5-gallon carboy to let it finish fermenting. Then the 6-gallon carboy will be clean and available for the next batch of beer.

Coming up next: a tasty honey wheat beer!