Progress

After about three weeks of fermentation, we decided it was time to check the gravity of the beers.

Things looked good! They dropped such that the final alcohol percentages were around 5.5% and 5.8% for the Pale Ale and the dark beer, respectively. More importantly, they tased good, even warm and uncarbonated. The pale ale had a crisp, malty flavor, with a pleasent bitterness on the finish. We had decided to dry hop this one, and this was before the dry hopping, but it gave us a nice idea of what we could expect.

The dark one was a whole other thing entirely. It was rich, and very malty, with caramel and coffee flavors. It wasnt as bitter as expected from the roasted barly, so instead of a stout, we felt it was more in the realm of a strong porter.

After 1 day of dry-hopping the pale ale with ~50g Cascade hops, we bottled the beer, using about 80g of priming sugar each (we had ~16L of the pale ale and 15L of the porter). In retrospect, we overcarbonated the porter a bit, but it wasn’t detrimental.

Sampling

We ended up with about 55 500ml bottles. We let them sit for about 3 weeks, and gave them a taste:

The one on the left is the pale ale, and the one on the right is the strong porter. The porter, as you can see, is slightly overcarbonated for the style, but it was still very pleasant to drink. Rich, slightly boozy, smooth, sweet, with a dry finish. The pale was refreshing, bright, and really benefited from the dryhopping, having a wonderful Cascade aroma.

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Notes

I would do the recipe again: both turned out quite good. Moving forward, we need to address the sparging issues we ran into, as the beers ended up being the same graity., indicating our efficiency of initial extraction was subpar. It could be due to any of the following factors: grain milling, sparge tube perforations, mash temp, mash agitation, recirculation, etc. Also, we need to more carefully calculate the sugar used for priming.

Up next: the Scotch wee heavy!