Smoked Malts & Super Yeast

As I mentioned in this previous post, I wanted to try brewing with more grains. Hence, I decided to put together a recipe for the rare and elusive rauchbier using a lot of grains. This fit, because the the smokey flavor of a rauchbier comes from the smoked malts. As my buddy described, it's "like drinking a campfire." Kind of like an Isle of Islay scotch.

The result was:
3 lbs of cherrywood smoked malt
1 lb of beechwood smoked malt
3.3 lbs of liquid munich malt
3.3 lbs of liquid dark malt (I accidentally had ordered an extra one of these with a previous batch, so it fit in here)
2 ounces of Hallertau Hops (I was thinking of Mt. Hood for a spicy more spicy sort, but Hallertau seemed to be most common in other rauchbier recipes; hops chart)
1 vile of liquid White Labs San Diego Super Yeast

I still have yet to purchase a good grain mill; however, I noticed an option to pre-crush the grains at purchase, so I decided on that. As you can see, they did quite the job milling the grains below. Much better than my ziplock bag and wooden block.

Crushed!

When boiling the grains, you typically use something called a muslin bag, to allow the grains to steep while being easily removable. Luckily, I still had several large muslin bags lying around, as I certainly needed it with 4 lbs of grains. It was definitely the most I've stuffed one so far.

Giant muslin bag

Typically at the start of a boil, I add to gallons of water to the brewpot, so I stuck with that trend this time. After boiling and removing the muslin bag, I realized that there was only about 1 gallon left, meaning the other had been soaked up by the grains and bag.

Now the typical solution to this is something which I've done in the past called 'sparging', which would have allowed me to regain a lot of the sugars  and good liquid. However, by the time I realized how much I'd lost, the muslin bag was already in the waste. Hence, I'm hoping I still am able to achieve good amount of the smokey flavor, despite the lost juice.

An additional change I made to my custom recipes this time was picking a liquid yeast, this one being called White Labs San Diego Super Yeast. The choice behind this was, I've heard good things about White Labs and this one had a somewhat high optimum fermentation temperature between 65-68 degrees, which is where my closet is usually at during the winter.

Super yeast!

Typically I get dry yeasts, but this one was liquid, which you have to be slightly more careful with. However, from what I understand it doesn't make a huge difference whether it's a dry or liquid yeast in the long run. The final reason which I went for the San Diego Super Yeast was because it's a very active yeast, which means that my closet would be doomed with yet another explosion of krausen if I did not setup a blowoff tube. So I did, and although it's not as fun to watch bubble as a typical airlock, you still witness plenty of bubbles as the super yeast works away.