October 2019, Vol. 25, No. 6 page 17. Neither stout nor porter, this beer is full-bodied, bold and black with flavor characteristics of dark chocolate, mocha, molasses and dark fruits balanced by piney citrusy notes of Pacific Northwest hops.
Notes:
Mill the grains, then mix 4.6 gallons of 169 F strike water to achieve a single infusion rest temperature of 154 F. Hold at this temperature for 60 minutes. Mashout to 170 F if desired. Vorlauf until your runnings are clear before directing them to your boil kettle. Batch or fly sparge the mash to obtain 6.5 gallons of wort. Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops at the times indicated left in the boil. At 15 minutes left in the boil, you can add either Irish moss or Whirfloc as fining agents as well as the blackstrap molasses. After the boil, add the flameout hops into the wort and whirlpool for 15 minutes before rapidly chilling the wort to 66 F. Pitch yeast. Maintain fermentation temperature and do not exceed 70 F for this beer. Once primary fermentation is complete, add the dry hops indicated and let them extract 4 days. Bottle or keg the beer and carbonate to approximately 2.5 volumes. One of the hurdles in crafting this beer will be mash pH management and how you handle the black malt if you're an all-grain brewer. Personally, my well water is a bit on the hard side so the acidity that it brings allows me to hit a proper mash pH of 5.2-5.5 and so I add them right in the beginning of the mash. For others, you may want to consider adding the black malt during the vorlauf process (recirculation). The other sticking point will be dry hopping the beer as oxygen is the enemy of fresh, hoppy beer. Keg-to-keg transfers under CO2 atmospheres is probably your best bet. Don't let the dry hopping go longer than 4 days for fear of extracting plant matter into the brew. But the option of performing a single, massive dry hop vs. dry hopping with individual varietals sequentially is completely up to you.
