This beer was a struggle. Chris from Pohjala Brewing<\/a> set me up with an amazing recipe. Since this beer was so big I figured I could get a partygyle off of the second running like I did with my Kate the Great Clone, the Empress. The plan was for 11G batch, the mash in was packed full, and the boil started as planned. About 15 mins left in the boil I did a measurement and discovered I had way too much wort. I did some quick calculations and determined I needed to boil for another 2 hours on top of the planned 1 hour boil. So 3+ hours later I called the boil complete and did all the normal cold crash, oxygen, and yeast pitch. The fermentation kicked off like a machine and twice I had to clean the bottom of the fermentation chamber. Well after about 7 days I measured the FG and it was 1.044 rather than a planned 1.026. I gave it a few more shots of oxygen, roused the yeast up, left it for a few days… and no changes. So I assumed that my yeast tuckered out. Using the yeast from one of the partygyle beers, I did a starter to get things going and re-pitched. I got a few small bubbles over the next too days, but no real changes. I think what I saw was the starter fermenting out, but that made me think that the yeast wasn’t the issue. I started tinkering with the recipe in beersmith to see if I could find any errors. Randomly I selected the muscovado sugar to be non-fermentable (like lactose) and what do you know it predicted the FG to be right where I was at. So either something was off with the muscovado sugar, I added it to fast and caramelized it, or the 3+ hour boil caramelized it. Either way this at least eased my mind about what was happening. To correct for this I make a simple extract porter beer and blended it in at about a 10\/4 ratio. This got the FG down to 1.032 which seemed okay for this large of a beer and kept the ABV in the range that I was aiming for. So instead of 10G I ended up with about 14G. I’ve placed 5G in a whisky barrel that my brother had and let that sit for about 2 months. The taste sample was amazing and I’ve now bottled 5G of the barrel beer (Dusk) and 5 G of the non-barrel beer (Dawn). The other 4G are now sitting in the barrel and will be Twilight whenever I bottle it. All the bottles were bottled with cask ale yeast and priming sugar. I haven’t yet cracked a beer yet as I’m waiting until Thanksgiving or so. Updates to come<\/p>\n I spent way too much time coming up with a beer name for this. The beer name for the original recipe is OO which means night in Estonian. In trying to be clever I wanted to do a play on words and call this Knight or tie this back to Estonia. I researched Estonian knights and learned about several famous clans(?) including Order of the Cross which most everyone knows by the cross on the shield. Since I knew I was ending up with 3 variants of this beer I was looking for a succession class or something that would work nice, but I struck out here. Instead I landed on Kolm which is Estonian for three. I like the way Kolm Knights looks, even if I am probably mispronouncing Kolm, and it translates to 3 Knights, very fitting. Since OO means night, I’ve named each of the variants a phase of the night<\/a>. And there you have it clever beer name that nobody will probably ever get if I didn’t write this down. I’ve worked the estonian knights onto the beer cap which depicts the Order of the Cross shield on it. Yes, I spent too much time thinking about this.<\/p>\n PHOTO GALLERY TO COME (after I open the first beer)<\/p>\nMy Brew Notes<\/h1>\n
Execution Notes<\/h2>\n
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Recipe Info<\/h3>\n
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Recommendations for next time<\/h2>\n
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Research<\/h1>\n
Pohjala OO Info<\/h2>\n