Brown Porter. ?

[brenmurph]

Judged porters wit grainne metalman in nationald we wer in disagrement who went best of show. Forget his name flew in from usa and he took over from us to decide. His conclusion.........one of de beers clearly used a generous brown malt addition.....it won

[biertourist]

I was going to same the same thing. 

We're getting into controversial style guidelines ground, but, IMO, brown porter isn't just a porter with lower levels of highly roasted malts so that it isn't as dark as normal / "robust" porter (BJCP categorization, anyway), it needs the flavor of Brown malt featured somewhere. 

IMHO, brown porter harkens back to the old porters that existed before the invention of the roasting drum and black malt; even if they include heavily roasted modern malts they still need that Brown malt flavor that you just can't get anywhere else.

A brown porter that doesn't include brown malt is, just a brown ale, IMHO.


Adam

Fair point, however i should note that i used the brown porter profile above as it most closely matched the ingredients at hand, however i also did not know about the brown malt as previously mentioned. I am thinking now that would actually make a fairly easy grain bill,say 4kg brown malt and 1 kg pale malt, then maybe 40 grams of fuggles at 60 and away ye go ? 

The thing is the brown malt these days doesn't taste like it used to.
80% wouldn't give you enough diastatic power to convert the lot I don't think.
Can't find any lintner specs on modern brown. Even if it has none, Maris Otter has about 120 degrees lintner so technically it can convert itself and about 3 times its own weight if you want to go really high but it would take some coaxing.
I'm familiar with old porter recipes but what I'd say is go for 40% Brown and 60% pale. That would give you something close to the 1800's.
Then do your bitterness ratio to whatever to re-create the old style.
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There was a UK maltster threatening to make diastatic brown malt (they posted on the Barclay Perkins blog trying to get enough interest, but I don't think it ever happened; I signed up to be notified and heard NOTHING).

Another very good point about not going crazy with modern malt percentages trying to recreate a historical porter recipe with huge brown malt percentages.  I did an 1850 historical porter recipe (using one of Tim and Grainne's porters for the aged portion, actually) and I used 58% pale malt and the rest non-diastatic malts (amber and brown) and it just BARELY converted after a 90 minute mash and increasing the temp of the runoff for a while. (A higher DP basemalt like US 2 row or 6 row or even German Pilsner malt would let you go with a higher % of brown malt; but with MO as your basemalt; 40% is about the max brown malt you can go and get conversion.) 

My old recipe: http://www.beoir.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=6252


Adam