I found a recipe for a honey porter and it sounded good to me so I plan on brewing it up this weekend and I wonder what your guys’ opinion is on it.
.5 lb. Black patent malt
.5 lb chocolate malt
1 lb. medium crystal malt
6 lbs. amber liquid malt extract
2 lbs. wild honey
1 lb. clover honey
1 oz. perles (60 min)
.5 oz fuggles (30 min)
.5 oz fuggles (5 min)
White labs Edinburgh ale yeast
Go for it. Experiment and evaluate. That’s a fair amount of easy fermentables for the yeast. Watch your temps so you don’t get a bunch of fusels. I judged a “honey porter” and I thought I was going to go blind even after my small pour.
Sounds like way too much honey to me. Honey is going to dry the beer out. With that much honey (almost a third of your entire fermentables) you are almost bordering a braggot.
I’d go with no more than 1 lb of honey and substitute the rest of your fermentables with DME.
I did a braggot over two years ago and didn’t like the results. However, inspired by this thread I dug two of the bottles up and just put them in the fridge. Will report back later.
Thought it was a bit too much honey myself. Based on my experiences with adding honey to beer a pound per 5 gallons is plenty.
Shave back the honey and tweak back the dark malts ever so slightly and you have a nice plan.
I already decided to drop to 2 lbs. honey and am still thinking about going to 1 lb., I am also trying to decide when to add the honey. Some say it is best as fermentation is at the highest and some say after going into the secondary. I am leaning towards after 48 hours or so.
I also thought about cutting the black and chocolate backa bit, but as my grains are all mixed, it may be a bit of a pain.
Just finished with two bottles of braggot. First one had rounded out and I could taste the caramel malts really well, but the second one tasted wrong. Dumper. I’ll give them to the neighbor. ;D
But in a Porter I bet you could get away with 10-15% sugar based on honey. Steeping grains already mixed?! Use them!
I ended up brewing this up back on the 18th and waited to add the honey until I had a good active fermentation, which ended up being at 36 hours. Also I only ended up adding 1.5 lbs of “wild” honey instead of the 2 or 3 lbs. I originally planned.
My OG was measured at 1.050 @ 66 degrees, but I didn’t take any reading after I added the honey. I took another reading today and got 1.020 @ 66 degrees. I had an estimated FG of 1.015 so I am hoping it still goes down a bit. I am still getting some fermentation going which I am attributing to the honey. What I am wondering is what adding that honey would have done to my OG if anything.
You can assume that honey will have a potential gravity of about 1.035. That means 1 lb in 1 gallon gets you 1.035. There might be better numbers available if you’ve measured your honey, but it’s an approximation. We’ll call this 35 gravity points.
So, you added 1.5 gallons, that gets you 52.5 gravity points. If this is a 5 gallon batch, then you just divide by 5 to get 10.5 gravity points. You’re starting gravity was 1.050, or 50 gravity points, so 50+10.5=60.5. So once you added the honey you can estimate a SG of 1.0605.