Update on the 600 Post BIPA.
This is clearly a cursed beer brewed by an idiot
My first clue should have been the infected starter. Not sure how/why that happened...I paid all due dilligence to cleaning and sanitization. Maybe it's just that I was doing a starter with dry yeast, which I was later told is not recommended. (Danstar Nottingham) Or maybe the yeast itself was bad. It did occurr to me afterwards that the first two yeast packets were not hard and compact as were the ones I replaced them with.
It did seem a bit odd that it started immediately bubbling the airlock after pitching, and that it was done fermenting after 12 hours.
Next, I screwed up my LHBS grain bill order and mistakenly instructed them to combine my cold steeping dark grains with the crystal and munich. At that point, my original recipe was out the door. I had two choices, Mini mash the whole thing, or cold steep the whole thing. I chose the latter given the fact that I ordered 3X the normal recipe amount for the dark grains to account for cold steep efficiency loss.
Well, as it turns out, there wasn't much loss at all. My 5 gallons of cold steeped water ended up at 1.038 before ever adding any DME, candy sugar and oats.
My pre pitching OG was 1.080...just a bit outside of the 1.067 I was shooting for. I should have reduced the DME weight to compensate, but then I thought...hell, this ain't the beer from the recipe anyway. Might as well imperialize it.
Then to top it all off, I had a 10 oz blow out to clean up last night. But how does the wort taste? Imagine this if you will...take an old rasputin russian imperial stout, and shake the piss out of it to decarb it. Then, boil it down to, oh, 25% of it's original volume, add an ounce of vodka, and a 1/2 oz of witch hazel...then mix in a teaspoon of french roast grounds. Mmmmm.
I refuse to dump this beer so long as it doesn't get infected. If nothing else, it has potential as a blender, and it can only improve with age.
Look what you made me do!!
