An Imperial Evening

How's this for ill-advised?

I'm brewing the second incarnation of my 1856 Imperial Double Brown Stout, a classic Barclay Perkins recipe from Old British Beers.

On a week night.

This was one of the 5 or 6 defining beers of my "career" and only a couple of bottles remain (It was a tiny 3.5 gal. batch on the first try due to various fuck-ups). The process involves 28 lbs of grain for a 5-6 gallon batch. Oh, and 16 oz. of East Kent Goldings.

We're an hour and ten minutes into the boil with at least another 90 to go, I suspect. Target original gravity is 1.007.

I ran off an additional 6 gallons of second wort which, given the energy, I will pasteurize later tonight. Hopefully tomorrow I'll toss in a bag of crystal malt and a little roast barley and make a small session stout with quite little work. But today is rather labor intensive, given the necessity of side-by-side double sparging.

The end is not really insight, but at least the sucker is in the kettle now and an initial floor washing restored a semblance of order to the place.