Brew Day – Dark Warrior Imperial Stout
I have been looking forward to this brew day for a while now. I have been wanting to make an imperial stout for a while, so I got up this morning and milled about 21 pounds of grain and set off to brew this beast. Today was not the optimal day to brew. It was cold and windy. Wind is not a good thing when you are trying to boil 7 or 8 gallons of liquid on a propane burner outside. My new Hurricane Burner could not get the job done. I might have eventually boiled my wort, but I had to switch back to my old burner which is more powerful to get the job done today.
I learned something new today. It's actually something I wondered about, but now I know. When you are brewing a specific quantity of beer, your brewhouse efficiency decreases as the weight of the grain bill increases. I'm not sure if there is a formula to estimate this, but my MLT that normally produces efficiencies of 80% only kicked out 70% today with a 21-pound grain bill. There is nothing wrong with that, but I had formulated the recipe for 80% efficiency which means my original gravity was off the mark. I was hoping to get 1.110 and ended up with 1.097 instead. This is still a big beer... it's just not where I had hoped it would be...
A 24-ounce mug of my Vienna Blonde made me not worry so much about my original gravity...
Next up in my homebrewing arena is probably gonna be an American Brown Ale. It's either gonna be that or a full batch attempt at a Helles Bock... We'll see what happens...
