Bourbon Barrel Porter

Fall is upon us once again and you know what that means. Its time to put whiskey in your beer so you can stay warm on those brisk fall nights.

This is probably my most interesting batch to date...starts with a robust porter base that you add oak cubes and whiskey to during secondary fermentation. You let those cubes and whiskey hang out in the fermenter for a full 6-7 weeks to let all those smoky, grainy, whiskey flavors mix in and ka-blamo, whiskey beer.

This beer is probably going to be brutal. The wort was the thickest I have made to date. I steeped a full 2 lbs of grains...a mix of chocolate, dark crystal and black malts and added both dried malt extract and dark malt syrup. After the 60 min boil I would put this wort in at about 10W30 at least. Everything about the boil smelled great...the hops were interesting, a few strains I have never brewed with before, Chinook and Argentinian Cascade. I can't wait to see how this matures and what the eventual mouthfeel is going to be like, I can only imagine, as DT would say, pure intensity.

This batch will be hanging out until Dec 6th when it will then quench the thirst of the attendants of the 6th annual Thanxmas celebration. Too bad I can think of maybe only 5-6 people who will actually want to drink more than one of these, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

*UPDATE*: I may have done something special with this batch. I don't want to talk it up too much but I think the 6th Thanxmas is going to be a good one. I may even be able to get more than 5 people to drink this contrary to what I thought originally. Taste was smoooooth, even before conditioning. As long as nothing funky happens in the next few weeks I think The Blue Zoo Fam is going to like this batch A LOT.

I recently got to witness Jomo bottle his first batch of 'Sherpa Ale' so I thought I would post some pics on the right way to bottle beer haha.

Jomo went with the manual siphon technique...I prefer automatic.

Although I will be honest, it took him about an 8th of the time to rack to the bottling bucket as it takes me. But I guess the trade off is my siphon also filters some crap out. Crap is bad.

When you reach a certain level Joe, the beer bottles itself. I was taking a nap when this picture was taken.

How long until Dec 6th?