Coffee Vanilla Porter

Every once in a while, I diverge from Belgian and farmhouse styles to brew something of the English persuasion. For this batch, I decided to brew up a Porter, which has been one of my favorite beer styles for a long time. It had been a while since I brewed one, so I decided to re-brew a recipe from a small-batch Robust Porter I had made about two years ago that turned out to be quite delicious. 

When I put together that recipe a couple of years back, I had just finished reading through Ray Daniels' book, Designing Great Beers. His analysis of NHC award-winning beers and their ingredients was incredibly helpful in putting together the fairly complex malt bill for this beer.  The original brew was just a 2-gallon batch that I split into two 1-gallon jugs. One jug was left alone to be a straight-up untouched porter, and the other got 1-ounce of coarsely-ground Kona coffee beans and one split-and-scraped vanilla bean after primary fermentation. The coffee & vanilla version turned out to be the favorite in our house, so I'm now scaling it up two years later for a full 3-gallon batch, but with just a couple of differences. 

The first difference was the choice in coffee. After sniffing (literally) around the bulk coffee section at my local grocery store, I landed on an organic French Vanilla coffee, which I'm hoping will help to pop the vanilla character of the beer, which I felt was lacking a bit in the original version. I considered making a cold brew with the beans and adding it to the beer to taste, but with the original version, I was actually pretty darn happy with the coffee character I got by adding the beans to secondary for a week, so I decided to stick with that process. 

The other differences with this batch are in the water profile and the mash/lauter process. For the original batch, I used tap water that had been painstakingly filtered through a Brita pitcher, whereas for this batch, I am using reverse osmosis-filtered water and adding back in gypsum and calcium chloride. In the sparging department, I went with the batch-sparge method the first time I brewed this, but this time around I will be using the amazing and time-saving no-sparge technique.


Recipe Specifications
Batch Size (fermenter): 3.1 gal
Estimated OG: 1.055 SG
Estimated Color: 28.6 SRM
Estimated IBU: 38.2 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 65.00 % (No-sparge)
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Fermentables:
75% - 2-Row Malt
8% - Dark Munich Malt
6% - Chocolate Malt
6% - Crystal 60L
3% - Carapils Malt
2% - Black Malt

Hops:
.68 oz. Northern Brewer (Pellet, 7.3% AA) @ 60 minutes - 30.1 IBUs
.37 oz. East Kent Goldings (Pellet, 4.8% AA) @ 20 minutes - 6.1 IBUs
.35 oz. East Kent Goldings (Pellet, 4.8% AA) @ 5 minutes - 2.0 IBUs

Yeast:
White Labs WLP002 English Ale - .5L starter

Other:
3 oz. French vanilla coffee beans (very coarsely ground) - 6 days secondary
3 split and scraped vanilla beans - 6 days secondary

Water:
RO filtered water - added 3 grams of calcium chloride and 2 grams of gypsum to the strike water.

Mash:
Single-infusion @ 155 degrees (No-sparge)

Notes:

Brewed on 7/17/16. 

First no-sparge brew using new 10 gallon mash tun. Used RO water with 3 grams of calcium chloride and 2 grams of gypsum added to strike water. 

Mash pH came in at 5.25. 

Efficiency was lower than expected with no-sparge in new mash tun. Increasing boil to 90 min and adding 6 oz of honey with a few minutes left in the boil to get closer to my target. 

Pitched entire .5L starter into wort at 67 degrees.

7/31/16 - SG is at 1.012. Added 3 oz. of coarsely ground French Vanilla organic coffee beans and 3 vanilla beans, split and scraped. 

8/5/16 - Kegged. Shooting for 2.5 volumes of CO2.