Nobody could be more surprised at my brewing a porter than me. Among all the styles out there that are popular today, I’ve tended to find porters to be the least accessible. Not that I haven’t liked porters, but I did generally feel that the richness, the complexity and the intensity overwhelmed my palate. When looking for toasted, roast flavors I reached for stouts and dunkels. Porters seem to be a style that has to be arrived at for some. I recently made my acquaintance with Southampton’s Imperial Baltic Porter, and was blown away by the chocolate and toffee notes. It was sweet without being cloying, presented rich flavors and aromas, and had a lingering finish with a suggestion of “toasted” at the end. Sometimes all it takes is trying the right beer at the right time. This was a good beer, and the timing was just right for this month’s brew.
Dark & Emo Suicide Porter in the fermenter
That this month’s brew happens to be a porter is a happy accident. Over the summer, I ordered a grain bill for a recipe that I never got around to making. I also had odd measures of a bunch of specialty grains left over from other batches, including a hefty amount of chocolate malt 350L. All in all, I had about 12 pounds of grain– enough to make a pretty decent beer. The plan was to simply dump it all into the mash tun and see what came out the other end. If the gravity was light, I could always add extra malt or adjuncts. I put my grain bill into Beersmith to see where the color and gravity would come out and, tweaking the number a bit, found that I had accidentally created a porter. I wouldn’t have been as excited if I hadn’t just acquainted myself with Southampton’s brew.
Home made candi sugar
One of the things I really liked about the Southampton was the pronounced toffee notes, something I wanted to recreate in my own brew. I had the idea that I might use toffee in the recipe, either as an adjunct or something to enhance the flavor. I found a recipe online for making toffee that involved baking table sugar in the oven until melted and caramelized. The caramelized sugars are supposed to completely ferment out, but leave a residual flavor reminiscent of toasted marshmallow. I decided to try it as an adjunct. I made the toffee by adding some water and vanilla extract to 2 cups of sugar, and then roasting it in the oven on a greased cookie sheet at 350°F for about a half hour. The sugar melted and roasted to the rich brown color shown to the right. After it cooled, I broke it into rough chunks to add to the kettle at the end of my boil. In the end, 8oz of caramelized suger went into the brew.
The caramelized sugar adds color to an already dark brew. The caramel flavors are intended to complement over 24oz of chocolate malt. The malt has a wonderful chocolate-coffee flavor that I have been looking forward to using all year. I had been thinking to do a Milk-Chocolate stout with it, but decided to go with the chocolate-toffee porter instead.
Dark & Emo Suicide Porter
The brew itself is ridiculously dark. The first runnings from the mash tun looked more like motor oil than wort. As we were stirring it, we were amused by the opacity. Normally you can see maybe an inch of handle in fresh wort as you’re stirring. This particular brew just seemed to eat the light. I considered a number of names to describe the color and aromas in the kettle. There was coffee, chocolate, caramel and this preternatural blackness. It made me think of Seattle coffee shops, grunge music and cool, dark, misty overcast nights. It feels like this is the perfect beer to brood over while listening to really bad poetry in a dingy club on open mike nite. The name came out of nowhere. I liked it, and it stuck. I really can’t wait to see how this one comes out.