Homebrewing: Chocolate Oatmeal Rye Oatmealless Porter

After debating for a while about what our first proper dark beer should be, we came to the conclusion that we needed to make an Oatmeal Porter, the one that they have on tap at Flat Rock Brew Cafe being a key element in the decision. Having decided this, on Tuesday we headed north to Country Brewer and purchased Chocolate Malt, Pale Malt and some LMEs. We also grabbed a half kilo of Rye malt, with plans to use it in a Future Brew

Rye Malt and Chocolate Malt... Wait a Minute

All seemed good when we were about to start brewing on Thursday... Until we realised that none of the malts we were planning to use had any Diastatic power... Oops. This would have left us missing out on a whole lot of sugars from the grains, which made up over 10% of our sugars, a fairly major hit. So the last minute decision to swap out our Oats for Rye malt, which has a decent DP, in order for us to get conversion of the other malts used.

The result was our chocolate oatmeal porter becoming a chocolate oatmeal rye oatmealless porter... Or a chocolate rye porter for short, similar to the Little Creatures Mr. Obadiah, which in fairness we both love.

So we brewed away like usual, with the only major changes being a full sparge, which previously we hadn't had the patience for, and the addition of some bittersweet cocoa to the boil, which we believe should make the beer have a moderate to strong chocolate taste.

Porter on the left, Lambnesia on the right

While the wort was cooling down, we racked Melo's last brew, a Roast Lamb inspired herb beer with the working title of 'Lambnesia' into secondary, then poured the COROP into our primary and pitched the yeast.

Now we play the waiting game... If it turns out well, this beer is getting kegged and served at our Beer SpecTAPular on the 26th. Time will Tell, and I'm hoping it tells us the story of an awesome chocolate porter, not a gross failure, but we'll see

Next time: Not sure what we'll do next, wait and see I guess?