Critique my First All-Grain! Pecan Brown Porter

Just got a new all-grain setup. Here's my details. Let me know what you think. Based on a lighter brown porter. Hoping to keep it ligher and a bit more balanced so there's a chance my lame "non-beer-drinking" friends will help drink it. Most of them are Bud/Miller guys and won't drink it if it's too dark... babies...

Specs (from Brew Builder on brewmasterswarehouse.com)
Size: 5 gal
OG: 1.053*
FG: 1.018 (mine should be lower since i'll do a 1L starter)
IBU: 33.4
SRM: 10.42 (this will be darker since roasted pecans aren't accounted for)
ABV: 4.58
*based on 75% efficiency... first time with this setup, so no idea what my brewhouse efficiency will be. I have a rectangle cooler mash tun with a PVC manifold on the bottom.

Grain Bill:
4 lbs: 2-row Pale Malt
4 lbs: Maris Otter
1 lb: Caramel 60
8 oz: Flaked Barley (for head retention to offset pecan oils)
1.5 lbs: Chopped and home-roasted Pecans

Hops:
2 oz: UK Goldings for full 60mins
.5 oz: Uk Goldings for final 15 mins
Whirlfloc Tablet at 15 mins

Yeast:
1L starter from either English Ale (WLP002) or London Ale (WLP013)


I plan to mash for 45 minutes at 155F, Sparge for 20 minutes or so, then Boil.

Ferment in my basement (a pretty steady 64-67F)

I guess my biggest question is if anybody has experience with Pecans, what's the best way to brew with them? I saw some forum on here that said Lazy Mongolia just roasts them and adds them to the mash. Would they be better in the boil?

:rockin:

I have brewed a few pecan brown ales. If you search the forum for pecans, you will find a post on lazy magnolias pecan brown. It has great instructions for brewing with pecans. It has been a while, but this is what I recall doing for my favorite pecan brew:

Roast the pecans three times, about 10 min each. The first at 325f, then 375f, then 400f. In between each roasting, place the pecans in a paper bag and crush them with your palm. This serves two functions, it will break the pecans apart to increase the surface area of the pecan in contact with the wort, and it will transfer head retention killing oils into the paper bag. When one bag is saturated with oil, transfer to a new one, I used probably a dozen paper sandwich bags total. Once roasted, split the pecans, I used 8oz in the mash, and then 3oz at 5min left in the boil.

This beer had a noticeable, but well balanced pecan taste.

Also, very important, if you are cracking your own pecans, make sure you get rid of all of the bitter pith that sometime breaks off into the seam of the pecan nut. It is extremely bitter, and I would think could ruin your beer if too much made its way in.

Cool! Thank you. I'll use that roasting schedule.

I did see that forum. The user Spy'kd or something like that works there and sort of confirmed they are in the mash (towards the bottom so they don't float).

On there, the consensus was about 8 oz. After looking, my local store sells pecans in 11oz bags, so I think that's how much I'll use. I have a pretty basic grain bill, so I'd like to capitalize on the pecans I think. Most recipes I've seen have much more complex grain bills than what I'm planning, but I think being my first all-grain I'd like to keep it somewhat simple.

I'll be sure to post back on here and let you know how it goes!

Does the rest of it look okay?

Like I said, my grain bill looks a little plain. I still wonder if I should be adding some black/chocolate/roasted malts yet. Will I have enough complexity using only 1lb of caramel 60 and 1/2 lb of barley flakes for specialty grains? I am using 2 base malts, and I guess I'm sort of using the pecans as a specialty grain as well (character and color)...

I was considering maybe using wheat flakes instead of barley flakes to follow the Lazy Magnolia's recipe a little more too.

I might consider adding a little pale chocolate malt, and maybe a little special b (a few oz). But then again, it is not bad to keep it simple. The more complex the malt bill, the more the pecans have to compete with.

For the grain bill I would consider:
Adding some chocolate
Splitting the crystal up between two different kinds, darker and lighter
Using black malt instead of roasted barley (for many people this is the difference between porter and stout)

I think that would give you a porter with more depth.

I dry hopped with 1.5 lbs of roasted pecans for about 5 days...turned out really well.. Pecan flavor is perfect

Wow.. learning experience for me here.

First of all, thanks for the great feedback. I wish I would have read some of it before I started. I don't think this will turn out great. We ran into a lot of problems, and I'm sort of worried about it... But relax don't worry, right? I'll see how it turns out. 2 major problems we ran into:

1) Volume -- Greatly undershot volume, had to top off with 1-1.5 gallons of water at the end. I wanted to reach 5 gallons, and thought I'd rather just have a lighter beer.
a) Didn't realize how much I'd lose from the Boil Kettle. The ball valve sits up sort of high, and the inside reaches into the center of the pot by an inch or so, so even with tipping it i'll bet we left a gallon in there.
b) 3 autosiphons were included in the all-grain setup I got on craigslist. Couldn't get a single one to work. The guy told me he THOUGHT one worked. Apparently he was wrong. I ordered a new one... so that was frustrating. (with all the messing around with 3 different autosiphons and different tubing, I got pretty worried about sanitization. I had starsan that I was rinsing everything I used, but there were a lot of things in and out of the cooled wort...

FYI- I sparged to get 6 gallons in my BK. It boiled down to about 5, and I left another gallon or so in the Boil Kettle (lots of hot break... Couldn't keep the bazooka filter clean enough to drain). Next time, I'll up the grain bill, get 6.5 gallons, and maybe use an autosiphon to get a bit more when it's done draining, so leave .5 gallons behind.

2) OG : Since I topped it off, my OG was down at 1.042. So it's definitely not a porter. It's a pecan brown. Which is okay.

3) Mash Temp: Next time I think I'll have to do a bit of a decoction mash. We were outside, and we had a very cold day (high in the teens). I wanted to mash at about 155. We started out at about 159, and after an hour was down to 148... Pretty inconsistent I know, but we'll see how it works. I'm using a rectangular cooler with a manifold.

Like I said, learning experience! We'll see how it works....

I always keep a funnel with a removeable screen sanatized at all times during my boil and end processing, would you have been able to just pour the left over from the kettle directly into your fermenter? Keep a clean but older towel/blanket to cover your tun to keep warmer. At least use another cooler/buckets/ tarp/ any darn thing to block the wind, which helps a bunch too. How long did you boil for (60 min or 90min)? Try mashing during the day, or atleast time for you'll cool down your wort to be later in the day, last night my wort dropped about 6* cooler in the same amount of time that I usually run my wort chiller; I love pitching my yeast right around 70*. Make sure you temp gauges are calibrated too. I will aim for atleast 6.5 to 7 gallons to get my 5.5 gallons by the end of boil, depending on whether I'm planning a 60 min versus a 90 min boil.

With having a retangular mash tun, did you get most of the wort out, or was some still stuck in the bottom. My rectangular cooler is not flat on the bottom, so I have to tilt to really get as much as possible, which means I'm getting an arm workout holding that thing, but sooo worth it. Congrats, it should still come out tasty !

Wow, thanks a lot ocean. Good stuff there.

I'll definitely be covering my mash with a blanket. I like that idea. I might do one quick decoction in the middle anyways to try to hold a better temp (at least in the winter.) After reading more about the different rests and step mashes, I'm not really sure what to expect when varying from ~160 to ~150 throughout the mash.

Boiled for 60. I added a whirlfloc tablet at 15 mins left, and it cause a TON of hot break. More than I was used to with extract. I do have a strainer, I should have thought of that. :/ We did pour some of the kettle directly into the fermenter, so I'm going to transfer to secondary this weekend. There's a lot of trub in there right now.

I have an electric probe thermometer that was sanitized and left in both the mash and the chill.

We pitched at about 70 as well actually. Normally we're good with 80-85, but because we were boiling a 2nd extract batch (kit of xmas ale) while it was chilling, we left it immersion chilling for quite a while.

I like this! It really helps me to talk about it and get it in writing. Right after we were done, I was frustrated thinking "dang, that didn't work at all. We had so many problems." But after writing them down on here and vetting them out, I'm realizing it was really only a couple of things. The drop in mash temp prolly isn't the worst thing, and we missed the volume/OG by quite a bit. That again is expected with a first all-grain.

Sounds like you could benefit from a brewing software such as Promash or Beersmith. This will tell you your qts/lb. water to grain ratio, the amount of water needed and temp needed of your strike water in order to hit your desired mash temp, and also the amount of sparge water to hit your target volume into your BK. May have missed it but are you batch sparging of fly sparging? I shoot for a qt/lb of around 1.5 because if I got much thicker, say 1.2 my wort will not recirculate. FWIW, I don't think I would make it a habbit to pitch at 80-85 . At the end of the day you made beer, you will get familiar with your setup and things will run smoother and smoother each brew going forward.

Cheers

Tamingthebrett said:

FWIW, I don't think I would make it a habbit to pitch at 80-85 .

Cheers

Click to expand...

Darn skippy..don't wanna shock those yeasties too much...hence why I love pitching @ 70* not only less shock, but allows for a smoother transition since it's closer to your ferment temp.. Your yeasties have to asses the situation before attacking those fermentables, less car crash they have to wake up from, better performance and quicker start.

You will experience better temperature control and better extraction rates if you switch to using a round beverage cooler with a proper false bottom. The nicest off-the-shelf cooler-based false bottom design that I have used since I started brewing back in the early nineties is the 16% open area design that Adventures in Homebrewing sells on their web site.