I'll Have a PB&J and a Beer, Minus the J

Happy New Year fair readers!  How were your holidays?  Do anything fun for Christmas and/or New Years?  My wife and I went to Poland, and we came back!  Had a local beer there, Zywiec, which is a lager and so wasn't my favorite, but my foray into beers this past year has taught me to respect the styles I don't normally drink, and I enjoyed tasting a local 1/2-L of cold-fermented gold.  But I'm back now and have some time to spend crafting a post about the batch I brewed back in December, before things got crazy trying to tie things up and prepare for our 10 days in Eastern Europe.

Milled grains, hops, PB, and yeast: Together they form yummy beer!

For this batch I wanted to brew another darker, heavier beer for the winter, and the Brooklyn BrewShop Beer Making Book had a recipe for a porter with peanut butter.  Again this beer may a bit too hip for everyone's tastes, but it intrigued me and I chose it for my ninth batch.

 Draining the first runnings from mashed malted grains. 

Again I mashed in the oven with my remote probe digital thermometer.  It went well but started at a temperature lower than I wanted.  For this porter I wanted it a little sweeter and maltier, so after about 20 minutes of steeping in the oven I put the mash pot back on the stove on high heat and increased the mash temperature to 156-158°F.  I then replaced the pot in the oven and continued the 60-min steep, sparged with 170°F water, and got sweet, sticky pre-wort for the boil.

First (left) and second (right) runnings from the mash and sparge.

Next, of course, was the boil.  The recipe called for a 75-min boil, and lately I've been allowing the boil to go on for 10-15 min after heat break but before adding hops just for extra protein coagulation and sugar concentrating.  So the wort boiled for 1.5 hours, and I added the hops and smooth natural peanut butter at the prescribed intervals once I started the 75-min count.  With so many additions in the boil you have to keep close attention to the time, but writing out the recipe beforehand, knowing math, and using a timer takes care of that.

 

Boiling wort ready for hops and PB.                 Hops and PB weighed/measured out.

A quick note on peanut butter use: This is another hipster recipe, so it's written for ease in the kitchen and not necessarily best practices for brewing.  A prep note in the recipe directs the homebrewer to skim the naturally separating oil from the top of the PB and measure the amount to be used from the dry, crumbly stuff below that.  Anyone who regularly consumes natural peanut butter knows that if you leave it alone for a while, on the order of weeks, will you get that amount of separation, and only if you haven't mixed the oil back in at some point.  For this batch I purchased a brand new jar of natural PB, opened it, poured the oil sitting on top into another container so I could mix it back into the rest of the PB, and measured out my 1/3 C.  I left that alone overnight covered with plastic wrap hoping that more oil would separate out.  A negligible amount did so, so there was a nominal amount of PB oil that went into the boiling wort.  This was noticeable in the fermentation, racking, and bottling.

First half of Northern Brewer hops for bittering.                   1/3 C natural PB for flavor and texture.

Second half of Northern Brewer hops for flavor.                                               Fuggle hops for aroma.

After the boil came to an end the pot lid went on and the whole thing went into an ice bath in my Cube cooler.  The wort chilled to the appropriate yeast-pitching temperature and the two went into the fermenter.  That's when I noticed an issue: the wort, even after straining every last drop from the PB and hops sludge (in which I had to take a break in filling the fermenter to clean out the strainer so I could continue with good wort flow through the strainer), did not fill the fermenter up to the gallon mark.  I had mis-guessed the amount of sparge water needed to get enough pre-boil wort to account for boil off during the longer boil.  I wasn't far from a gallon, but it was frustrating.  The reason this happened is that I don't make careful measurements or calculations about how much strike water I should use or how much sparge water I'll need.  I've read that the brewer should use 1-2 qt H20 / lb grains.  I've used 1 qt/lb, 1.5 qt/lb, and 2 qt/lb, and have settled on 1.25 qt/lb for my mash.  I've also read the brewer should have 2 gallons of pre-wort going into the boil because water boils off at a rate of 1 gal/hr.  I have not found that to be true and thus a source of too much unused wort after filling the fermenter.  My year of experience and built up intuition has lead me to use about 8-9 qts of strike and sparge water combined, with the sparge amount the difference from 1.25 qt H20 / lb grain volume.  However, as I've learned with this batch, I need to keep in mind the boil time and use more sparge water accordingly.

And now a bunch of photos:

I make this joke every time: wort chillin' like a villain.

Chilled wort going into the fermenter with the hydrated yeast.

Fermenter with blow-off tube and bottle ready for the brew bin.

Note how the wort doesn't go up as high as I normally fill the fermenter.

OG reading of 1.082.  FG was 1.021.  This gives an ABV of 8.0-8.6%.

After a night of fermenting.

Before racking.  See the yeast foam floating on the PB oil.

9 bottles of peanut-buttery gold!  But must wait until late Feb to drink.

As you see in the last photo, I only got 9 bottles.  There was actually a 10th nearly full bottle that I would have been comfortable with conditioning, but it was the very end of the beer and there were still PB solids settling out of it and oil floating on top.  When I mentioned to the employee at Brew Mentor that I was doing a peanut butter beer he advised me to avoid the oil that would end up floating on top when I racked.  I did my best to do so when I racked, and you can see how there was still a lot of yeast foam floating on top of that layer of oil in the pre-racking photo above.  Despite aiming for this it didn't succeed fully and some of the oil stuck around through the racking and into the bottling.  I doubt there is no oil in the 9 bottles and all of it was poured into the 10th, but the beer going into the 10th bottle was visibly oily and solids rapidly settled out of it before I even capped it, so I just drank it.  It was good and I could recognize the high gravity.  I eagerly await to drink it, but it probably won't be ready until late February due it's high gravity.

Unlike my previous posts where I wrote about recipes I made up on my own through combining recipes from various sources, this is one straight from the Brooklyn hipsters.  But I modified it somewhat and do things a little differently than what's printed in the recipe book, so here you are:

PB&Porter

Grain Bill:

2.5 lb 2-Row Pale Ale Malt

0.25 lb Caramel 60 Malt

0.10 lb Chocolate Malt

0.25 lb roasted barley

Strike 3.9 qt H2O at 165°F. Mash for 1 hour at 156°F.  Sparge with 5 qt H2O at 170°F.

90-min Boil:

0.2 oz Northern Brewer Hops 10.6 AA% @ 75 min

1/3 C Natural Peanut Butter @ 45 min

0.2 oz Northern Brewer Hops 10.6 AA% @ 30 min

0.2 oz Fuggle Hops 4.8 AA% @ 20 min

Cool to 70°F in ice bath. Hydrate and pitch 1/2 packet Safale S-33 yeast. Bottle with 3 tbsp honey.

So there you have it.  As it's a higher gravity I'll let this one sit until late February.  Hopefully it'll turn out good and not be too oily.  You can follow the full photo gallery here.

What's the craziest ingredient you've used in a homebrew batch?  Or one that didn't turn out as well as you hoped?

Until next time friends, happy brewing!