Peanut Butter Porter v0.1

This is my FIRST peanut butter porter recipe, so it has a lot of commentary and is not the excellent polished product you would expect from the prestigious SleezySherm Breweries.

Grain:
8oz Chocolate Malt
12oz Black Malt
4oz Roast Barley
3oz Rolled Oats (aka quaker oatmeal)
13oz Cystal Malt 60 L
5lbs Light malt extract (liquid)

Hops:
2oz Willamette AA 4.8%

Other:
4oz Natural Peanut Butter (with the oil removed)

Method:
Heat the grains in 2 gallons of water at 155 F for 1 hour
Bring the wort to a boil and add the malt extract, peanut butter, and 1 oz of hops
Boil 30 minutes, add additional 1/2 oz hops
Boil 15 minutes, add additional 1/2 oz hops + Irish Moss
End at 1 hour total boil

Transfer to fermenter for 10 days, transfer to a secondary for 10 days.
If you still see oil floating on top, transfer again every 2 days until you rack out the oil.

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How to get the oil out of peanut butter:
Buy a jar of natural peanut butter (the kind without stabilizers that has a layer of oil floating on top). Pour out the oil and leave it on your counter. Every 2-3 days open the jar and pour out the oil that has collected on top of the peanut butter. After about a month the oil will be mostly removed. Use a knife to remove the top layer of peanut butter from the jar - the layers underneath will be dry and crumbly (like a piece of halvah). The dry crumbly stuff is what you want for your beer - you can eat the smother still oiled parts of the jar.

Notes:
I gave the version of the recipe I made - after sampling I recommend the following:
12oz Chocolate Malt
6oz Rolled Oats (Oats and Wheat help with head stabilization - the peanut butter will act against head creation, so if you want a nice head on your beer, you need to add stabilizers)
6-8oz Peanut butter - I found the peanut butter flavor to be a little understated at 4oz, but I'm not sure if 8oz would be too much. Experiment and get back to me...or wait till I make it again and I'll get back to you.

Summer time, and the brewing’s tricky

The average high temperature in New York has been about 88 this week, so I'm declaring the major brewing season officially over.

If you think I'm going to stand in front of a stove with 2 burners going full blast for 8 hours you're kidding yourself...

Ok, maybe I'll do it 2-3 times, but no more than that!

I usually do lagers in the summer because I have to ferment them in my fridge anyway. I've got the grain for a nice German Hefenweizen, but I may see how it turns out if I lager it instead (using regular ale yeast to make an American Wheat works well, why not find out what a Lager Wheat tastes like).

Then I'll make my summer pilsner (ready in August) and Oktoberfest (ready for late September).

But maybe I'll switch back to extract brewing for the summer - then I'll only need one burner for 2 hours.

The results are in!

I've had a chance to sample the peanut butter porter and the hard lemonade as they've been aging towards completion.

The peanut butter porter is a little under carbonated (I ran out of malt extract priming sugar and didn't think to put regular sugar in) and is a little light in the peanut butter flavor. Mostly it tastes like a porter, with a highly peanut buttery aftertaste - good, but not quite there. I'll post a recipe shortly.

The hard lemonade came out pretty normally, despite the fact that it was reading 1.030 gravity for 2 months. I guess Minute Maid has added something to their mix that caused the gravity to shoot up - the final result is very clear, very clean, with a nice citrus sour aftertaste.