Peppermint Porter (Batch 245)

I was looking through the most recent Zymurgy Magazine a few weeks ago and came across a beer recipe for Peppermint Porter.

This particular recipe caught my eye because the peppermint flavoring was from something I've never thought of.

Peppermint Tea.

I've always used peppermint extract, which, to me, sometimes add sort of an artificial peppermint flavor to beer.

I thought I should give this a try. My wife always tells me that her favorite X-Mas Ales are the ones that have peppermint flavoring in them.

I thought that giving Peppermint Tea a try would be useful research for future considerations.

Obviously, I can't just follow a recipe from a book or magazine, so I designed my own little porter recipe ...

Peppermint Porter

Note ... I'm not crazy about the name. My wife brought up Peppermint Patty of Peanuts fame, but we didn't really come up with specific names that really sang to us.

Anyway ... on Sunday December 1st, I made my 245th batch of beer.

I got up a little after 5am and started heating up water in the kitchen.

It took me awhile to get to the right temperature but my mash timer was going at 6:06.

I got through the mash and started collecting first wort at around 7.

My kettle was full and on the burner by 7:15.

My preboil volume was really low,  and I added almost a gallon of water to the kettle.

My preboil gravity was then low, so I boiled some to evaporate.

Yes, obviously it would have been more efficient to have not added as much water,  but oh well.

Once it got going,  the boil went fine.

Turned the burner off at 9:07 and added tea bags.

It was almost 9:20 before I got the wort chiller going.

After half an hour,  I switched to the pond pump to recirculate freezing water. This time, I used snow for that water.

By 10:15, the wort was down to 60 degrees and I was filling the fermentor.

I was all cleaned up by 10:40.

I only got 4.5 gallons or so into the fermentor with a starting gravity of 1.055. Not sure why both were low. Strange. To be that far off, I must have gotten too little base grain.

Anyway,  the beer is fermenting. In fact,  it is probably done. I'm not sure when I'll have a keg ready,  but when I do,  this will be ready to put in it.

Really looking forward to trying it.

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