The beginnings of Porters

We've finally decided to start with a Porter which I have been looking forward to doing for a while now.  Unfortunately, they did not have the basic ingredients for your standard Porter so we had to use a copycat from Heretic Brewing called Shallow Grave.  We'll see how it turns out though.

For those that might be curious as to the reason I title this post "The beginnings of Porters", it's because Porters actually come in different types.  Now, a Porter itself is an Ale, which means it is top fermentation, but a strong Porter is what is commonly known as a Stout.  Then from there you have Imperial Stouts and so on.  So I wanted to try to understand what exactly divides up the different variants so when I start doing more custom brews I can determine what I'll need and why.

While brewing we ran into a snag, however.  When I quickly turned off the temperature once it hit boiling, in order to allow the wort to calm down and not boil over, I didn't realize the flame had not relit like it normally does.  Because of this we lost a lot of heat and had to rush to get the heat back up and fast.  Now, the only real thing we can do to help facilitate this with our setup is putting the lid on and hoping it traps enough heat within.

We did eventually get the heat up and we tried to boil it for longer to make up for the lost time, but it will be hard to know until we get further in the fermentation process.  At this time it has been a week since we brewed and the yeast has been going crazy, so we're hoping that is a good sign.  If worse comes to worse I just remember a story I was told once by someone whose son had taken up homebrewing.  They had brewed a Stout and it had turned out bad, so no one drank it, but they forgot about it for a year then figured what they hey and popped them open.  What they found was that the extra time in the bottle had mellowed out the bad taste and given it a more chocolatey taste which everyone enjoyed.  So just remember, when in doubt, just wait longer.