Sunday 21 October 2012

AG #70 Coffee Stout Mark Two

60g of Pearle for bittering with Calcium Chloride and table salt. 
Having not told you about the home brew coffee stout mark one. I suppose it is a bit rude of me to go straight to number two (oo-er missus) but I'd better bring you up to speed, dear reader. 

You'll know that I was involved in the initial brewing of Tap East's Coffee In The Morning Stout so I thought I'd have a go at trying to make something similar myself. My first attempt at the Coffee Stout essentially lacked enough of a coffee hit. That was partly my fault because I used cheap coffee in a cold steep in secondary fermentation. 

The cold steep and secondary fermentation bit is ok but the cheap coffee bit is not.So later today I shall be going down to my local coffee store to talk to someone who knows a bit more than I do about coffee. 


HLT Temp at 75.6c ready for sparging
So, I'm trying a couple of new things with this brew. The first is a much stronger grist base. I'm going for a 7%-ish beer (mark one was 5.4% and, while it had enough body it just needed a deeper alcohol base and more of a coffee kick). 

This one contains 6kg of pale malt and some of the usual suspects, torrefied wheat, crystal malt, choc, roasted barley and black malt. I've also added 200g of flaked oats for a bit of body. 

In a departure from my usual mashing schedule I've gone for a lower mash temp to try and extract some more fermentable sugars. I normally mash for an hour at 70c but this time I mashed for 75 mins at 66c. 

The plan is to steep whole coffee beans in the secondary in the manner of dry hopping. It's not a new idea, I was stealing it from Kelly Ryan but it's a bit of guess work trying to work out how many to use. I'm going to start off with 250g and go from there. 
Recipe:

Grain Bill
6.3kg Pale Malt
300g Chocolate Malt
200g Crystal Malt
200g Flaked Oats
200g Torrefied Wheat
100g Roasted Barley
100g Black Malt

Boil Ingredients

60gm Pearle 8%AA FWH
500g Dark Muscovado Sugar
30g Bramling Cross 6%AA - last 15 minutes

Water
As per Homebrew Forum stout profile

Yeast 
SO4 - 18g

Expected OG 1072
Actual OG 1076
IBU 56




Saturday 20 October 2012

Beer Porn - Rye PA

I must do this one again  - can't remember which hops were I used but it was about 7.5% rye with the rest of it spit between maris otter and lager malt. Yeast was US-05.


AG #69 Dark Mayhem

So, I've not blogged for three months. I've got so many things to say; some I can tell you about, others you'll just have to wait and see. 

One of the things I can talk about is my Star Anise Stout, Dark Mayhem. Aside from the star anise and the T-58 yeast used to ferment it, the recipe is pretty straight forward with the bulk of the grist made up of pale malt but with brown, crystal, melanoidin, flaked barley, flaked oats as well as roasted barley, crystal and chocolate malts 

I've been using motueka hops for bittering as I came across a large (cheap) stash of them but the main flavour will come from 4 flowers of star anise popped in the boil 15 minutes from the end Anyway, here are some pictures 

75g of Motueka hops for bittering
A gentle trickle of black lovliness from the mash tun
oops - perhaps I only needed one sachet of yeast