Busy Day

These multiple-step brewdays are NUTS!!

I had to brew the Porter#3 (which was all F'ed up), put the Barleywine (which hasn't gotten down to the gravity I wanted), and bottle the Wheat#2 (the only bright spot).  I got it all done in 5 hours or so, but it was a pain in the ass,

First of all, the Porter, which I really want to turn out well, fell victim to my incessant tweaking fetish.  If i was smart, I would have just accepted the efficiency of my system, and made adjustments when I scaled up...but no.  I had to get all smart and mess with my process.  I upped the amount of water I used to mash the grains, added a mash-out step by raising the temp, over flame while stirring, to 168F.  I held it there for 10 minutes, then drained it through a colander to the boil kettle.  Then I returned the grains to the mash pot, and rinsed them with the rest of the water, which was at 170F, and drained them through the colander again.  My efficiency went up to 80...yes 80%.  63% to 80% is huge, and not a good thing when you're trying to keep at least some kind of consistency.

This forced me to add some water to the boil to get to the correct gravity, and then boil a little longer to get the right IBUs from the hops.  I ended up with 1.25 gallons of Porter (0.25G of which I dumped) at a gravity of 1.057.  The IBUs ended up a little low for the style, which is not too bad.  Thank God I decided I was going to leave the brown sugar out this time, or I would have had like 3 gallons of wort.  Here's the recipe:

-2lbs Maris Otter
-0.1lbs Flaked Barley
-0.05lbs Black Patent
-0.15lbs Chocolate Malt
-0.1lbs Crystal 40
-0.3oz Fuggles @ 70 mins
-0.2oz Fuggles @ 30 mins

The Wheat, on the other hand, ended up perfect in terms of gravity.  It actually went down to 1.012, which is a little lower than I expected.  The Safale US-05, as I have read, loves Wheat Malt.  I bottled three with 5 carb tabs, and three with 6 carb tabs to see where I want the carbonation to be.

With the Barleywine, I placed it in secondary with a little fresh yeast to try and bring down the gravity some more, as it was stuck at 1.037.  It's going to be in there for a while, so I guess we'll see what happens.

This weekend, I'm bottling the first Pale Ale experiment, and brewing the first Brown experiment.  I honestly can't wait to taste the Pale, so I'm glad its only 2 weeks away.