This past Monday night I brewed up 2 one-gallon all grain beers, a porter and an ESB. The porter recipe (below) was inspired by Founders Brewing Company’s year round Porter and for the ESB recipe I looked at some recipes on Home Brew Talk and Brew Toad and put together my own simple recipe. As this was my first time brewing one-gallon all grain beers; there were a few factors that I had to do my best to control in order to increase my chances of hitting my target original gravity. The first factor was boil off rate…As an experiment I decided to start with 1.625 gallons in my 8 quart pot (ESB) and 1.75 in my 12 quart pot and keep both of them on the same stove flame level. In the end one factor that I forgot about was measuring where the one gallon mark on the 1 gallon fermenter (demijohn) is. So after assuming that I fell short in terms of volume with my ESB I made sure to run the trub from the porter’s pot through a strainer in order to get as much wort into the fermenter as possible. The next factor that I tried to control was insulating the pots during the 75 minute mash. Each pot was wrapped in a towel and then a light blanket was draped over the two pots. Both pots ended up losing 8 to 10 degrees (both started at 152F) and since I knew I’d be holding the mashes for 10 minutes at 168F (mash out) I wasn’t too worried about not achieving full conversion of the malt sugars. The third and last factor was yeast pitching rate. I chose to split a packet of SafAle SO-4 between the beers and in order to do so as evenly as possible I poured half a cup of boiled water into 2 pyrex measuring cups and then put one on my food scale and added yeast until half of its weight was in the cup. In the end the porter ended up getting a touch more yeast, but a half a packet is already too much for 1 gallon of beer so I wasn’t too worried about the beers not attenuating down enough during primary fermentation.
Recipes:
Please Support The Brewed Palate’s Sponsors:
Yakima Valley Hops
Bitter and Esters home brew shop (online orders available)
thebrewedpalate.com 