Java Stout

[Crossposted to and …]

~5.5 gallons of wort, boiling away.
(Click for more…)

So, what did today hold? Well, upon waking up I found out that was en route to my place to hang out during / help out with the beer brewing.

While waiting for her to arrive I did my best to prep ingredients as needed. While I should have started the mash at that time, it still worked out all right… Within a few hours the partial mash (and protein rest) were complete, and it was time to heat the wort for boiling.

Despite working out in the snow and ~20 MPH winds, boiling went pretty well. I had a couple of boilovers, but nothing too bad. I’m not sure why these happened, although it seemed that it may have been tied to whenever the wind would die down. The boilovers did result in some wort getting on the burner but hopefully this won’t be too hard (or necessary) to clean off.

The wort came out with a density (OG) of 1.073 which should make for about a 8% beer or so if my figuring is correct. It is now sitting on a milk crate in my bathtub and producing a bubble of CO₂ through the airlock every 30 seconds or so, which for yeast pitching plus ~2 hours isn’t bad. Although that may be because I had made a nicely active 32oz starter….

Anyway, that’s today’s brewing activity, and hopefully while moving it into secondary in a week or so I’ll also add 15 fluid ounces or so of very strongly brewed Zingerman’s In-The-House Blend made in my recently acquired Aerobie AeroPress.

With any luck, people will like it as much as they did the Vanilla Stout (photo gallery retired).

(Hmm, I guess I don’t know if there is any Java beans in the blend, so I can’t rightly call it a Java Stout… May have to change that… Hmm…)