Ego boost

This weekend I served some of my just ready Vanilla Bourbon Porter to family, friends and neighbors, I'm used to polite encouragement and comments but I really think they were blown away.

There was a long discussion about how and with what to serve the beer with and requests for additional bottles. This is the darkest beer I've made and I'm quite proud of it.

I was pretty nervous about balancing all of the flavors and was a bit disappointed when I tried the beer a few days ago at room temp but at 42f all of the flavors came out and it was awesome.

Beer #5 is definitely my best to date, now I have to bottle my Graff.

Congratulations! It is great to share beer with people who appreciate it! Skaal

rcreveli said:

This weekend I served some of my just ready Vanilla Bourbon Porter to family, friends and neighbors, I'm used to polite encouragement and comments but I really think they were blown away.

There was a long discussion about how and with what to serve the beer with and requests for additional bottles. This is the darkest beer I've made and I'm quite proud of it.

I was pretty nervous about balancing all of the flavors and was a bit disappointed when I tried the beer a few days ago at room temp but at 42f all of the flavors came out and it was awesome.

Beer #5 is definitely my best to date, now I have to bottle my Graff.

Click to expand...

How much bourbon did you use? I have one of these in primary right now and the recipe has a pretty large variable on the bourbon addition.

That is a great feeling. I wonder if your success was due to your brewing a darker beer? Have you played with water chemistry at all yet? The majority of water is suitable for your average beer, but some is better for very light, or very dark beers. if you have a lot of Residual Alkalinity, you might be able to make darker beers taste good a lot easier than lighter beers.

I started with 16oz of bourbon I had three Vanilla beans and 1 oz of oak cubes in it for the about 2-2.5 weeks. I then Strained out the solids and added them into the secondary and I believe I brought the bourbon level back up to 16 oz's but I didn't mark it in my notes. The cubs soaked up a fair bit. I did not pre boil the cubes as some have suggested. The beer was in secondary for about 1.5 weeks before bottling. It carbed fully in 3 weeks.

Homercidal said:

That is a great feeling. I wonder if your success was due to your brewing a darker beer? Have you played with water chemistry at all yet? The majority of water is suitable for your average beer, but some is better for very light, or very dark beers. if you have a lot of Residual Alkalinity, you might be able to make darker beers taste good a lot easier than lighter beers.

Click to expand...

I haven't played with water chem much but I know Lancaster has hard water with a lot of Ca. Apparently the German immigrants were big fans of the water here.

I used 500ml of Makers Mark in 5 gallon for mine. I did a titrating test, where I took 5 100ml samples of the porter and put in increasing measured amounts of Bourbon to find the one I thought was best. Then it's just a math problem to figure out how much to add for 5 gal. I wanted it to be a supporting background flavor, not club you over the head with bourbon. Mine you get richness in the mid palate, but mainly bourbon flavor on the finish. I've had people taste it and a few seconds later say, is that bourbon i'm getting.. wow! BVIP is one of my most commented on brews, and the only one someone has offered to pay me to brew for them.

FYI my volume came from Denny Conn who used 10ml per pint so you can math it from that.