First Home Brew Session of 2014 - Pumpkin Spice Porter

On Saturday, March 29th, fellow members brewed their first beer for 2014, a Pumpkin Spice Porter. As you can see from the brewing spec's below, it does not have any pumpkin in it, rather a blend of spices. This was also Jelena's first introduction and initiation to home brewing. Other members, like Steve, Craig, Simon, Tofu and Joycelyn, helped Jelena with techniques and know-how. It was a nice afternoon of brewing indoors when it was raining and cold.

As always, when you brew you have a brew. We enjoyed a couple of home brews and commercial crafts: Tinyee's Belgian Blond Ale, Tinyee's and Craig's Belgian Dark Strong Ale, Benediktiner Weissbier, Lagunitas New DogTown Pale Ale, and Stone Brewing Ruination IPA.

The Pumpkin Spice Porter is the Brewer's Best Kit.

Here, Steve and Jelena are preparing the grain sock for steeping the specialty grains (top left). The grain bag is nicely steeping to give a deep and dark color to the wort. Then after about 20 min at 160 F, the bag is pulled out.

Then extract is added as the wort comes up to a rolling boil (top left). Once the wort is boiling, the first addition of hops is added, being careful that the wort doesn't boil over due to excessive foaming, i.e. hot break. The 55 min boil time starts. After the second addition of hops and spice pack are added, the wort needs to be chilled quickly. Here, we use an immersion chiller to chill the wort to about 75 F (bottom left). The wort is siphoned to the fermenter, where water was added to make up the volume difference, gravity checked, and yeast is pitched.

The beer is fermented at around 65-70 F for a couple of days before it will be transferred to a secondary fermenter, and continue fermenting for another week and a half.

We will be bottling in about 2 weeks, so stay tuned...