Cheshire India Porter

Andy and I both particularly like The Kernel Brewery’s Export India Porter. It’s a forthright little beer – deeply dark, with roasty coffee flavours but also hugely bitter with assertive hop flavours and aromas. You might think such strong hop flavour and aroma wouldn’t work with the dark malts, but it does. They complement rather than compete.
I bought a “bookazine” called The Complete Homebrew Handbook ages ago. Read it. Enjoyed it. Put it on the shelf. Only recently did I stumble upon the Export India Porter recipe in it. So we had to give it a try.
I have to admit I was astonished how much US hops were in the recipe. There’s 152g in there, if you include the dry hops. And they’re high alpha hops too (ie very bitter). Andy usually hates hops like that. But he’s a good sport and agreed to give it a go anyway since he likes the Kernel original.
We weren’t disappointed. I think this is a pretty good version of the original. Not a beer where you would drink more than one, but certainly a great one to have in store. Having said that, with all those hops flavours in there it probably should be drunk fairly soon before they fade.
I made one adjustment to the recipe because of what I had available, using amber malt rather than brown malt. I also note that the original Kernel beer states the hops as Columbus, Chinook and Motueka. The recipe used Magnum rather than Motueka and I went along with that.
One last point: the Columbus and Chinook hops we used were pellets rather than compressed whole hops. Usually I buy vacuum packed whole hops from either Morris Hanbury or The Malt Miller. But my local homebrew store is now stocking a range of pellets from Bulldog. I have to say I’ve been pretty impressed. They are easy to use (no hacking the cake of hops apart with a knife), pretty cheap and don’t fill your boil kettle with masses of vegetable matter which makes running off a bit easier. Hop pellets seem to be the only option in the USA. Looks like they are coming over here too.

Export India Porter

Grain bill
Maris Otter  4111g  72.7%
Amber Malt  500g  8.8%
Chocolate Malt  373g  6.6%
Munich Malt  373g  6.6%
Black Malt  150g  2.7%
Crystal 70  150g  2.7%

Hop schedule
Magnum  17.3%AA  14g  60min  23IBU
Chinook  13%AA  4g  15min  2.5IBU
Columbus  13%AA  4g  15min  2.5IBU
Chinook  13%AA  16g  10min  7.2IBU
Columbus  13%AA  8g  10min  3.6IBU
Chinook  13%AA  39g  5min  9.6IBU
Columbus  13%AA  17g  5min  4.2IBU
Chinook  30g  dry hop  5 days
Columbus  20g  dry hop  5 days

Water treatment: None
Yeast: 1 sachet Safale US-05, 1/2 sachet Safale S-04.
Batch size: 23l
Mash temp: 67C
Mash time: 60 min
Boil time: 60 min
OG: 1.061
IBU: 52.6 (Rager)
Colour: 30 Lovibond, 40 SRM, 79 EBC
Target FG: 1.013



Target ABV: 6.5%

Six Month Catch Up (Part 2)

Last time I posted I was trying to catch up with the brews we’ve made since my last blog posts. Without further ado…

Gyle 83 Vanilla Oak Unusual

We have a recipe that we call Audlem Unusual, which is very similar to Old Peculier – a particularly favourite beer. We usually brew this beer to be ready for Christmas. So we did this brew on 12th October and it fact we still have a little left in the barrel and it is drinking very well.
But this year we wanted to put a little twist on it, so we added oak chips and two vanilla pods. It was a subtle addition, but I think it was very nice for a change.
We used 30g of medium toast french oak chips, which were added to 200ml of boiling water (to give them a little sanitation). This was then cooled and added to the beer 4 days into fermentation. The vanilla pods were split and the seeds removed, then the seeds and pods were added to the fermenter at the same time.

Gyle 84 Milk Stout

Milk Stout is an unusual beer style because it is sweetened with milk sugar (lactose). This gives it a sweet flavour to complement the dark, rich full-roasted flavours of the stout. Lovely!
So why is milk sugar added, rather than ordinary sugar? Well ordinary sugar is fermentable by yeast, so will just give you a stronger dry beer. Lactose is not fermentable so you can rely on it staying in the beer to give sweetness.
As with many of our beers, I used the recipe from Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. I have had such success with the recipes in this book. There’s only one recipe per style, but that still gives you 80 recipes to try and every one I have done has come out extremely well. The recipes are formulated for brewing with malt extract, but for every one there’s an all-grain option with is easy enough to use to convert the recipe. If you make all-grain beer (or extract) you should have a copy of this book.
Oh, and of course the milk stout came out great too. It was another one we brewed for Christmas, so that and the Vanilla Oak Unusual gave plenty of dark ale variety.

Gyle 85 Export India Porter

This was such a great brew I think it warrants a post all of its own (and probably the recipe too). Watch this space…