You may notice some cosmetic changes to the website happening, as we streamline and update the format and the look. We don’t plan to change much as far as the content and style go; that all seems to be working pretty well.

One piece I have been asked to do more frequently, though, is tasting notes and reviews. I guess there are some folks out there who respect my taste and opinions about beer and want to know what I’m drinking when I’m not drinking my own homebrew. So OK, I will try to take notes from time to time and post some reviews of recent interesting commercial beers I’ve tasted.

One person who has asked for these reviews is my friend Sarah, wife of webmaster RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick.. And coincidentally, she dropped off a beer for me the other day that she had found in a store (not ours) while doing some errands. She and RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. shared 5/6 of a six-pack while waiting for me to get around to tasting my one bottle and giving my two cents. I’ve done one better and actually given them a clone recipe to brew it. Since today would have been Sarah’s late step-father Greg’s birthday, it seems especially appropriate to raise a glass to him, review the beer and publish a recipe to brew your own at home.

Coal Porter, brewed in Bar Harbor, Maine, by Atlantic Brewing Co.

This is a deep reddish-brown to almost black porter, with a thin but resilient tan head. It pours with the impression of thickness (which it really isn’t) and glows in the glass.

The nose reminds me of espresso beans (not necessarily brewed espresso, just the roasted beans), with hints of molasses and burnt sugar. There are some hop notes in the nose (a very English profile, to my senses) but the balance is towards roasted malt and sugars.

The first taste has traces of the same molasses, burnt sugar, perhaps toffee, and roasted malts. I detect a bitterness at the back of the tongue, but not much hop “flavor”. As the beer warms a little, there is more molasses and caramel, perhaps even a hint of praline/pecan. I like the balance between the roasted malt and the sweetness, it might well benefit by just a bit more mid-boil hop flavor.

This is not so much an American-style porter (like, say, Great Lakes Brewing’s Edmund Fitzgerald or the late-lamented Catamount Porter) but more of a mellow, sweet English-style brew, even approaching the sweetness and roastiness (if not the strength and full body) of the Taddy from Samuel Smith’s.

Overall impression: very drinkable sweet porter, not far from an English brown stout in terms of malt profile. If you like hoppy, aggressive American porters, this is probably not going to be your favorite. But if you like a more malt-oriented sweet porter, you will enjoy Coal Porter.

3.9/5

The Recipe:

5 gallons, all-grain

Ingredients:

• 8 lbs. 2-row pale malt
• 1/2 lb. 60°L crystal
• 1/4 lb. dark Munich malt
• 1/4 lb. chocolate malt
• 1/4 lb. black malt
• 8 aau’s* Target (or Magnum) hop pellets
• 5 aau’s Willamette (or Fuggles) hop pellets
• English Ale yeast (Danstar Windsor dry yeast, White Labs London Ale yeast)
• 1 cup amber DME (for priming)

OG: 1050

IBU’s: 37.5

Mash: 60 minutes in 13 quarts water at 152°F.

SpargeProcess of rinsing mashed grains.: 13 quarts water at 170°F.

Kettle: 60 minute boil, Target hops for 60, Willamette at knock-out.

Pitch yeast at 70°F.

Primary fermentation: 68 – 70°F for eight to ten days.

Secondary fermentation: cool (45 – 50°F) for three weeks.

Bottle condition cold for months (Atlantic claims to cellar theirs for six months before release).

What’s an “aau”? Hops used in a recipe are measure in basically three ways, depending on where you are in the process. The bitterness of a particular batch of hops is indicated as a “percent alpha acid”, or %aa. The higher the number, the more bitter the hop. The number of ounces of a hop used multiplied by its aa rating give the “alpha acid units” value, or aau. For example, 1/2 oz. of a 7% aa hop would give 3.5 aau’s. 2 oz. of a 4.5% aa hop would give 9 aau’s. When the hops are used in the boil, the aau’s are multipled by a utilization factor (ranging from .7 for dry-hops or hops added for less than 5 minutes of boiling; to 4.5 for hops in the boil 90 minutes or longer), a table of  which can be found in our Seven Barrel Brewery Brewers’ Handbook (p. 299). This gives you the approximate IBU (International Bitterness Units) rating. In this recipe, there are 8 aau’s for 60 minutes (factor of 4.25, or 34 ibu’s) plus 5 aau’s at KO (factor of .7, or 3.5 ibu’s), thus 37.5 IBU’s in total.

The other day was my friend RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick.’s birthday. His wife was out of town on business, so I thought it would be a nice way to keep him from getting lonely if I invited him to come up and brew with me. While I was at it, I also invited our friends Chris, who has some professional brewing experience, and Peter, who is about to move up to all-grain brewing. I wanted Chris’s input on improving my brewing system, and wanted Peter to see first-hand how relatively easy an all-grain brew can be. They all showed up at 8:30 and we brewed this semi-traditional German Rauchbier, while sipping a Hill Farmstead porter, “Twilight of the Idols”, that Chris had brought along (yes, a big Porter at 9:30 a.m. – surely a breakfast beer!). Peter had a lot of questions, the rest of us tried to answer them as best we could, and the Rauchbier got brewed.

The thing about this brew that makes it only “semi”-traditional is the fact that the smoked malt I used was my own. I was playing around last week with a way to smoke grains at home, over various local woods. Five pounds of the grain in this recipe was smoked on my grill over birch chips, giving it a wonderful sort of wintergreen aroma… The mash smelled really cool, and the wort in the kettle smelled even more amazing.

Rauch’n’Roll

5 gallons, all-grain

Ingredients:

• 5 lbs. Bohemian Pilsner malt
• 1 lb. melanoidin malt
• 2 lbs. birch-smoked Pilsner malt
• 2 lbs. birch-smoked Vienna malt
• 1 lb. birch-smoked 30°L crystal malt
• 1/2 lb. honey malt
• 1 oz. Sterling hop pellets (@5.7% aa)
• 1 oz. Liberty hop pellets (@5.2% aa)
• White Labs Old Bavarian Lager yeast (WLP920)
• 3/4 cup corn sugar or 1 cup light DME (for priming)

Procedure: Crush malts. Heat 15 quarts water to 163°F. Dough in and hold mash at 152°F for 60 minutes. Heat another 13 quarts water to 170°F. Begin runoff and spargeProcess of rinsing mashed grains., collecting 26 quarts sweet smoky wort. Bring to boiling, add Sterling hops. Boil 45 minutes, add Liberty hops. Boil 15 more minutes (60 total), remove from heat and chill to 75°F. Take a hydrometer reading, pitch yeast, seal and ferment at 60°F for eight to ten days. Rack to secondary, lager cooler (45°F) for three weeks. Prime with corn sugar (or DME), bottle and age cold (38 – 40°F) for six weeks.

OG: 1058

IBU’s: 31

Note on smoked malt: Not everyone will be able to smoke their own malts, obviously. You can substitute 3 lbs. German Rauchmalt (beechwood-smoked) and 1 lb. each Vienna and 30°L crystal. The Rauchmalt is more intensely smoky than my own home-smoked malts, thus you need to use less for the smoke level of this brew. More smoked malt will mean more smoky flavor, and it is easy to overdo it.

Home-smoking grains:I built a 12” by 12” box, 3” deep, out of hardware cloth, then lined it with aluminum window screen. The hardware cloth is sturdy as a frame, the screen is a much finer mesh. My gas grill has a tray you can set in on top of the flames to use wood or charcoal for grilling.

Birch chunks on the left, pilsner malt on the right...

I built a small pile of wood chips at the far left end and placed my screen box on a grill at the far right. I placed 2 lbs. of grain, dry, in the screen box, sprayed it with water to moisten it, and lit the gas under the wood only. Because it was not actually touching the wood but only the metal tray, the wood never actually caught fire but smoldered, nice and smoky, for over an hour.The draft pulled the smoke from the wood across and through the grains, which I stirred and re-misted every 15 minutes. After an hour of smoke, I spread the grain out on a large cookie sheet to dry then packed it away in 1-lb. units in zip-lock bags. I did a total of about 20 lbs. in different combinations – some pilsner malt, some crystal, some Vienna, some wheat, etc… over birch and then oak and then maple. Four or five of my next several brews will include a smoked component.

One of my local homebrew customers, Bill Wolfe, forwarded me this link to a pretty cool contest. If you use any Danstar dry yeasts (Nottingham, Windsor, Munich), save the empty packets and send them to Danstar to win a pro brewing course! See the website for details, and best of luck!