The Angry Scott is in the Primary!!

Well the first brew day is finally complete, things are bubbling away. I have the primary in a water bath and the temp of the water is holding around 72 degrees. I have not checked the temp of the actual brew.

This started out as a Belhaven clone but I had to make some changes.

I used almost 7lbs of John Bull light LME
2lbs of light DME
1lb 60L malt steeped for 20 minutes
8oz light brown sugar
2oz EKG bitter hops


.5oz EKG flavor
and 1 tsp irish moss

OG was 1.080

2 packs of Windsor dry yeast.

I have vigorous bubbling and foaming out within 5 hours of pitching.

I'll keep everyone posted, the plan right now is to rack to secondary Saturday and add some liquid smoke, I'm thinking 1-2Tbsp, Any suggestions?

Went out to the pub afterwards and had a triple floyd robert the bruce, I have to say this tasted exactly how I would imagine my Wort to end up. The wort was pretty good already.

Update:

Everything seems to be going well, I counted Yesterday and I had a bubble every 2 seconds and it has slowed to 1 every 10 seconds this morning.

Water bath temp is holding around 70-72 degrees.

Not sure what else to report, it is in a bucket so I can't actually see anything.

I was hoping for some input on the smoke extract??

Todd

As far as I can tell everything is going good, The weather dropped a bit here and the water bath is holding around 68-70 now, things have started to slow down. Only getting a bubble every 25 seconds now. Still on track to rack on Saturday, hopefully I can come up with a digital camera and get some pictures of it in the carboy.

Personally I would skip the smoke extract altogether. If you want to try it I highly recommend only using a tiny amount in a few bottles to see if you like it first.

Better still, try a drop or two in a glass of your normal homebrew. Keep adding until you get the smokeyness you want. I think theres roughly 80 drops in a teaspoon so you'll have to do the calculations when adding to a full batch.

A good recommendation. "Season" a pint first. I overdid the peat-smoked malt in my first barleywine and it took almost a year for it to mellow.

david_42 said:

A good recommendation. "Season" a pint first. I overdid the peat-smoked malt in my first barleywine and it took almost a year for it to mellow.

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Ok, the recipie called for 2 oz of peat smoked malt but i didn't have any, figured I could just add the extract to make up for it. I've seen this in some all extract recipies. I might just leave it out and see how it tastes..

I had a true Belhaven this weekend and they are the canned beer with the widget, there is no way my hombrew will be like that so no point in worrying about the clone too much.

Thanks for the replies,
Todd

UPDATE!

It is good!!! Racked to secondary this weekend and tried a sample. Very good. OG 1.082 FG 1.028 after 1 week. I think this comes out to 8.5%abv right?

Sounds like a very high FG; were you expecting it that high (I know some of the brown sugar isn't going to be fermented), or was it not quite done?

the_bird said:

Sounds like a very high FG; were you expecting it that high (I know some of the brown sugar isn't going to be fermented), or was it not quite done?

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It was still bubbling about once per minute. I'm not sure how to tell when it is done? I changed some things from the recipie but it said FG should be about 1.018.

You should be fine, it should finish out in the secondary, but don't bottle it until the bubbles DO stop. Assuming you're going to leave it in the secondary for a couple weeks, I would expect it will be ready by the time you bottle.

the_bird said:

You should be fine, it should finish out in the secondary, but don't bottle it until the bubbles DO stop. Assuming you're going to leave it in the secondary for a couple weeks, I would expect it will be ready by the time you bottle.

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yep plan was 2 weeks in the secondary. So there should be absolutely no bubbles or just no bubbles in a period of time? Is there a way to determine if it bubbles without watching it for 20 minutes? There is a bubbler air lock right now.