samfirke.com

  • Smoked Porter 2015

    Over the 4th of July, I smoked about 3 lbs of Pils malt on an old potbelly stove.  It smoked with mesquite chips for a few hours in two batches, then was left to condition for ~7 weeks in an open paper grocery bag.

    I first brewed a smoked porter with home-smoked malt in 2011.  I used alder chips then, in an homage to Alaskan Brewing Co.’s Smoked Porter.  It turned out well and the bottle I opened yesterday as I brewed the 2015 version has aged nicely.  The biggest flaw is that the smoke flavor is too phenolic.  I tried to avoid chlorinated water throughout the process but may not have succeeded.

    I brewed this year’s smoked porter on the same potbelly stove I used to smoke the malt.  I’ve already written about the process of brewing on the potbelly stove, so I’ll stick to the recipe and batch notes here. (more…)

  • Homebrewing on a Potbelly Stove

    My in-laws have an old potbelly stove sitting around.  Some research indicates it was made around 1900.  I smoked about 3 lbs of Pils malt on this stove on the 4th of July, and decided I’d see if it could crank out enough heat to brew a 5 gallon batch of beer.

    The answer: almost.

    pot on stove

    It heated about 4.5 gallons of mash water fairly well, heating it 86.7 degrees in an hour.  The slope leveled off a little as it reached strike temperature:

    potbelly_temp_ramp

    This performance of 390 degree-gallons per hour (when heating water starting at room temperature) is not too much worse than this same pot when I’m heating with a 1500W, 120V electric element – that setup yields about 480 degree-gallons per hour. (more…)

  • I have a blog

    Why a blog?  I have two main purposes in mind:

    1. Opinions & ideas that are too long for my Twitter my Mastodon.  I’ll probably tweet toot links to these posts.
    2. Knowledge management: I often make things after reading on the web about how to make them.  Sometimes I think, “the internet was wrong” or “I could explain it better than that.”  Now I have a space to see whether I can make some small contributions to human knowledge that others might stumble upon and benefit from.  I benefit tremendously from internet knowledge so I ought to give back what I can.
      1. I will also benefit from my own notes on past projects.  In particular, I use Brewtoad to design homebrew recipes, but lack a good system for storing notes on the process & results.  I like how the Mad Fermentationist logs his brews on a WordPress blog.

    Given that this may be a jumble of posts on DIY, beer, electoral politics, data analysis, etc. I expect that very few people will read through the blog continuously or follow it.  But if a few of the right readers find each post via other means, that’ll do.  And if no one reads it, at least I have a place to take notes.