PenSans Brewery - Recipe for PenSans Black & Roasty

The PenSans Black & Roasty Recipe

INFO for 23 litres at OG ~ 1044, ~ 44 IBU

Process info, specific to PenSans Black & Roasty is given here.

For more detailed info on the PenSans process go here.

HOPS	Purpose	Boil Time	Metric	Imperial	~ IBUs
Southern Brewer @ 9.0%	Bittering	90 mins	32 g	1.14 oz	44 IBU

Help me with bitterness calculations !

YEAST

A neutral ale yeast, or Wyeast 1084 or White Labs WL9

Help me with minerals using a spreadsheet !

Help me with minerals with a general discussion !

MASH LIQUOR

In your hot liquor tank, adjust the pH using an acid solution to a value of 6.1-6.4.
I choose not to add my minerals to the hot liquor tank, choosing instead to add it to the mash liquor in the mash tun prior to mash in.
Calculate the amount of mash liquor required as being 2.3 litres for every kilo of grain and then add on the volume of any deadspace, e.g. beneath the false bottom if your tun has such a thing.
Calculate your strike temperature to get an initial mash temperature of 64蚓. This is on the low side of mash temperatures and should help get a more fermentable wort, hence a drier final beer.
Add minerals to the liquor in the tun. (Read here for my reasoning). The minerals that can dissolve will dissolve in the couple of minutes that you spend gently stirring to ensure a settled liquor temperature.
Mash in using the gentle approach, not the "pour from a dizzy height" or "use a hand drill" approaches. See the PenSans Process section for more.
Mash duration 90 minutes.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

The amount of each ingredient was chosen to give around 23 litres of wort for fermenting. My reasons for this are that (assuming you live in a metric world of sorts) the fermentation buckets are 25 litres in size and 23 litres of wort allows for 2 litres of headspace, not a lot, but its balanced by the fact that you can get 20 litres of beer to bottle !
The basic premise in this recipe is that the base malt (pale) and the roasted barley are used in the ratio 90:10.
The hops are chosen to give a simple one off introduction for bittering purposes (i.e. boil for 90 minutes). This in character for a dry stout in that you do not want hop flavours or aromas in the final beer. I choose to add my bittering hops to the kettle as soon as the heating element is covered with spargings. This is commonly referred to these days as 'first wort hopping' and is aimed, amongst other things, at getting a clean bitterness. I also find, as an added bonus, that adding your hops well before boil helps reduce the chance of a boil over later (assuming you don't leave the lid on your kettle that is . . .).
Southern brewer will likely be unfamiliar to many out of South Africa but is essentially a high alpha bittering hop without any bad flavour or armoma elements, excellent for a dry stout. Feel free to substitute absolutely any hop, just adjust your amount added to compensate for the different alpha acid ratings.

MASH-OUT / SPARGING

Adjust the pH of the sparge liquor in your hot liquor tank to around 5.7, again using an acid solution.
In terms of sparge temperature, some brewers can add sufficient sparge liquor to "mash out", meaning to raise the mash up to 75蚓 at mash-end so as to stop further enzyme actitivty. However, those of us that can't directly heat their mash tuns or add further liqour should aim to sparge at around 75蚓. This at least keeps the run off at low viscosity so it runs off easier. By heating the spargings immediately as they enter the kettle you can also put a stop to those nibbling enzymes.
If you follow the suggested mashing in approach you should have minimal need for recirculation. Once the runnings are clear, sparge at such a rate that it takes 45-60 minutes to collect all your wort.

THE BOIL

A mentioned above, I add my bittering hops in a 'first wort hopping' approach, so they're in the kettle when the wort is still at 70-75蚓, at least 45-60 minutes before the boil starts.
Boil time is 90 minutes.
As noted above I add my minerals to the mash tun prior to mashing in, I have a few reasons for this, most notably that I avoid my electric heating element in the kettle from (i) scaling up and (ii) causing the minerals to promtly come out of solution through continuous heating. By adding them directly to the mash tun (obviously calucating the amounts based on the amount of liquor I add to my mash tun) I can assure a fairly close match to the target values. However, once you've sparged you will have 'watered down' your mineral profile in the final beer and so I add additonal minerals to the boil, say 5 minutes into the boil. If you use the calculations I provide for elsewhere in which you claculate how much extra liqour is needed to go from the mash to the kettle, you'll be able to calculate the amount of mineral salts you need to add.
Add Irish Moss when you have 15-20 minutes of the boil to go.
After 90 minutes, turn off the heating source, give a gentle but strong stir to get the whirlpool effect going.
Allow the wort to settle for 30-40 minutes to allow the trub and hop debris to settle.

THE BIG CHILL

Chill to pitching temperature (18-22蚓) using either an immersion chiller or a counter flow chiller.

OXYGENATE

I STRONGLY recommend that you invest in a stainless steel 'stone' with a porosity rating of a couple micron and use this, with an oxygen bottle, to inject suitable oxygen levels into the wort prior to pitching. Its a part of the real brewing process . . . if you can afford it, don't compromise !

FERMENTATION

Ferment at the correct temperature range for your yeast, this is typically 18-20蚓 for an ale yeast.
If you have made some cracking good wort, cared for it well, chilled it to the right pitching temperature, oxygenated correctly and fermented with sufficient yeast then your primary fermentation shouldn't take more than 4 days. After this, allow it to rest a day or two longer to ensure the yeast has done a thorough job.
You should then transfer to a secondary fermentor with finings and allow a further 2-3 days for things to settle out.

WHAT THEN ?!

Bottle or keg as you normally would. PenSans Black & Roasty Ale is presently chilled to 3蚓 for 3 days prior to filtration at 2痠 and force carbonated using a Co₂ / N₂ mixture. In 7 days I can have a great keg of dry Irish stout ready to drink !

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