New Brewer..trigger set, want to pull it!

Greetings! New here, new to homebrew, and probably overly ambitious (as most are, I'm sure)! I bought my Father and I starter kits for Christmas, I want BEER!!

My name's Eric, I'm just short of my 38th birthday. I like beer... a lot. Particularly malt-forward Porters.

I feel I have a good setup to start with, a number of stainless and enameled stock pots ranging from 8qt to 32qt, a sanitizer bucket, a bottling bucket, stuff for bottling and racking, thermometer, glass carboy, Wort Chiller, etc, etc..

I, of course, have a number of nOOb questions. All of which I'm sure I could find with the search function, but I'm limited on time (have to be on the road for work in about 12 hours, won't be home for about 36 hours) and I'd like to brew on Sunday.

Questions:

Using iodine sanitizer, do I need to rinse my carboy? Little concerned the supposedly "no-rinse" sanitizer may well "sanitize" my yeast!

I live in an upstairs apartment, my deck is open to the sky, and I have to boil outside. It's raining a lot (it's January in Oregon..nuf sed). Need I worry about contamination? Yeah, the wort will be boiling and will be cooled in the kitchen, but another pointless worry...

I am going with a Black Butte Porter clone as my first attempt. I intend to tweak it a bit to better fit my tastes.

Recipe;
6oz Chocolate
6oz Black
8oz Honey
8oz Crystal 40L
4oz Victory
1oz Northern Brewer-bittering (tweaked down from 1.5oz)
.5oz Cascade-flavoring (tweaked down from 1oz)
1oz Tettnanger-aroma
7lb light extract
8oz Malto Dextrin

Can I mini-mash those grains? Would it be pointless? Recipe calls for a steep, but I'd like to push the malt. Not even sure if there's any enzymatic malt in that bunch, to be honest!

On a whim I bought 8oz of 60% Cacao Ghirardelli baking chocolate. Okay to throw in the wort, or should I just give it to my ex to bake with?

I'm forced to relax and not worry with a 1/2 rack of Black Butte and/or a shot of Jager, but I should be ok for a couple months (or until I can concoct the PERFECT Porter...)!


Thank you,

Eric

Do whatever the instructions on the sanitizer say. No-rinse sanitizers are actually better because once you wash it all off, guess what? It's not sanitary anymore!

None of those grains needs to be mashed. Off the top of my head I think honey is the only one that might give you anything at all from mashing. Basically don't bother.

Rain shouldn't contaminate your beer but it's gonna make it harder to heat and keep hot, and screw up your volumes. You could boil with the lid of the pot mostly on. Normally you don't want to do that because it leads to a weird corn off-flavor called DMS but that doesn't really occur in extract beers, only all-grain. The DMS should have been removed by the extract manufacturer.

Glad you are so stoked to get started, this hobby rocks :rockin:

Ditto.

Sanitizer: If it says NO RINSE, then don't rinse it off!

(1) If you rinse out your sanitizer, you'll be introducing all the moulds, fungi, and bacteria that's in your rinse water. If you're diluting your iodine to no-rinse levels, then you will be fine.

(2) A little rainwater in your brew-pot won't be a problem in terms of sanitation, because everything is being boiled. You will, however, be adding water to your boil, and this will change your OG to varying degrees depending on how heavy the rain is. You'll also be introducing all the minerals and chemicals in the rain. I'd consider putting a bucket out during the next rain-storm, collecting some water, and testing it to determine its content. If it's pure H2O, then you're probably fine in a drizzle. If it's got lots of sulfur and gunk in it, I'd urge you to buy an awning or something.

(3) I disagree with DocJowles; Both Victory malt and Honey malt are recommended for mashing. You can check the malts chart for substitutions or, yes, you can conduct a mini-mash. There's an excellent post on how to do so on this site.

I'm also a little surprised by your recipe. . . it seems to have no base grains? And only includes about two pounds of malt? Are you going to add extract, I assume? How much?

(4) You definitely can throw the chocolate in the wort, but I would reduce your bittering hops to .5oz in order to avoid producing something too bitter. Moreover, I'd suggest that you use a darker chocolate. There's a good wiki-post on chocolate beers on this site.

pericles said:

(3) I disagree with DocJowles; Both Victory malt and Honey malt are recommended for mashing. You can check the malts chart for substitutions or, yes, you can conduct a mini-mash. There's an excellent post on how to do so on this site.

Click to expand...

He's brewing an extract beer, there's 7lbs listed in his recipe. I checked Breiss' website and it lists Victory as having 0 diastatic power and already being converted, so I am not sure where the wiki's info came from. Maybe something changed but I trust the maltster

Since it's an extract brew with no base grains, there will be zero enzymes and mashing would be pointless.

Ooops, missed the extract. The recipe is fine then.

As for the mini-mash: you'd have to replace some of the extract with base-grain in order to convert the starches into fermentable sugars.

on sanitizing, remember these no-rinse jobs are meant to be used on CLEAN equipment. clean equipment free of organics will not have much 'food' in them to make bacteria/molds/etc happy. Thus we don't have to nuke the gear with bleach or napalm to get it 'sanitary'.

if your gear isn't clean to start, you'll never get it sanitary. period.

so with clean gear its easy for iodiphor (or #1 star-san!) to sanitize effectively and require no rinsing.

We pitch BILLIONS of healthy yeast cells into our sanitized environment so they should have no problem getting a foothold.


I would avoid the rain in your beer. Pollution...acid rain...blah blah blah.

Thanks for the input!

Don't rinse

Rain somewhat Ok (getting cold and dry again, should be ok)

Steep, don't mash (Will try mini-mash next go-round. I REALLY like malt-forward beer.)

Chocolate ok with less bittering (sounds great to me)

Enjoy a micro and just brew!

Soon as I figure out who I loaned my LP tank to, I will. Went to the garage to get my Camp Chef and tank, and can't find my tank...BCS game at Dads tomorrow, will steal one of his (GO DUCKS!!).