Lutzen's Pleasing Porter

Classification: porter, extract

Source: Karl Lutzen (lutzen@novell.physics.umr.edu) Issue #700, 8/13/91

Very smooth, nice hop balance, but a bit heavy for a summer drink. Will try to save the rest for this fall. This might be considered a lager due to the refrigeration. It was only done because the ambient temperature of my basement "brewing room" hits 75-80 Degrees during the summer heat. I brewed this in early spring as an ale (65 degrees) and strangely enough, they taste very similar. (Drink a bottle of one version, wait, drink a bottle of the other, results: Who cares. Both are great.)

Ingredients:

3 pound can John Bull unhopped Dark
3 pound bag Northwestern Amber Malt extract
1-1/2 ounces Clusters 6.9% alpha (boil)
1 ounce Cascades 5.6% alpha (finish)
Ale yeast (your choice)

Procedure:

Bring 2 gallons of water and malt to a boil. Add 1/2 ounce Clusters at beginning of boil, 20 minutes, and 40 minutes. After 60 min. turn off heat, and add Cascades. At this point it was late in the evening, I poured the wort into my sanitized bottling bucket and brought the quantity up to 5 gals. and stuck the whole thing in the beverage refrigerator. Next morning I siphoned off the wort into the fermentor, leaving all those hop particles behind, pitched the yeast. Put on the blow tube, and put the fermenter back in the refrigerator. I had the temperature set at 50 degrees.

After a week, I replaced the blow tube with an airlock, and bottled after a month of fermenting.

Specifics:

O.G.: 1.052
F.G.: 1.016
Primary Ferment: 1 month at 50 degrees