On what was probably the hottest day in the last decade in San Diego, we brewed what we will now call JenEric Heatwave Porter. This is the first beer of a total of four styles that we are brewing for the Ninthlink holiday party. It was so crazy hot this day that we ended up brewing in our swimsuits, and were popping in and out of the pool, just to keep cool. Our brewdog Zoe has never complained during a brewday, but this might have been one of her favorites because she LOVES swimming!

This Robust Porter was recipe was based on the Robust Porter that we brewed on Big Brew Day in May. For this brew we were really trying to shoot for the classic style so we decided not to include any oats in this recipe, because the silky texture and full body were a bit out of style for this beer, even if is was DELICIOUS! Pale 2-row was the base malt for this beer, and we added some crystal and chocolate malts to add some caramelly and chocolaty flavors. This recipe included some Munich malt to provide a toasty, bready quality to the beer as well as some black patent to provide some roasty character.

During the mash we made good use of the pool, which was really nice since the wall thermometer was reading about 108 degrees, and as you might guess our mash temp didn’t drop even one degree during the 45min mash. This was good because we mashed relatively hight (158 degrees) to keep plenty of non-fermentable sugars around for malty flavors and mouthfeel. After the mash we recirculated for 15min, and after sparging had collected 13gal of wort in our boil kettle. We used traditional UK hops for this brew, fuggles and east kent goldings, and to provide a bit of hop flavor we added an ounce of hops to the wort at knockout.

After the boil, chilling the wort was one for the record books. It required over 50lbs of ice to chill the beer to about 70 degrees. The ambient temperature was so high that by the time we got the wort into the fermenter it had increased up to 75 degrees! This beer was the first to take advantage of our new fermentation fridge, and that was a good thing because I don’t think we would have been able to keep it cool enough with an ice water bath in that heat.

We fermented this beer at around 68-70 degrees with White Labs California Ale yeast – WLP001. On 10/05/12 we bottled this beer and still haven’t had a chance to try it. We hope it turns out great!