Brewing up Joseph and Peter's #1 English Porter

A little while back, I made up my own porter recipe for a 2 gallon test batch: Joseph and Peter's #1 English Porter. Last weekend I finally got a chance to try it out.  Along with fellow brewer Mark and good buddy Jesse, we spent the day brewing up this fine batch of what we hope will be a dark, malty, low-abv porter.

The most important step in brewing homebrew beer is cleaning and sanitizing.
You can screw everything up, but as long as it's clean and sanitized,
you're going to end up with something drinkable.

All the ingredients, lined up:  2-Row pale malt, Briess caramel malt,
chocolate malt,  Centennial and Willamette hops.  Yeast not pictured.

Our recipe today differed slightly from the one on the recipe page.  We left out the wheat malt, and upped to .75lb of the caramel and .25 of the chocolate malt to make up the difference.

Sweet, sweet malted grains.

Heating the water for mashing.  It felt odd to be using such a
small amount of hot liquor (that's the water, for you new brewers)
in this step.  I'm so used to using more for our bigger batches.

Mark, drinking  a beer and keeping an eye on our mash.

It smells awesome: super sweet with really strong chocolate aroma.

Jesse watching as we sparge the wort into the kettle.

Finally, after an hour of boiling, we chill the wort before
transferring it into the carboy and adding the yeast.

We finished up with 2.5 gallons of wort at 1.040 OG, right on the money.  Hopefully this turns out well.  I'm really looking forward to trying it.