Breakfast of Champions - Oatmeal Coffee Stout

This past Saturday I spent the afternoon brewing my second all grain recipe, an Oatmeal Coffee Stout. I designed the recipe shortly after brewing the ESB and did a lot of reading on forums to figure out the best time/form to add coffee to the beer. I've decided to add 1/2 pound of whole coffee beans to the carboy once I rack to the secondary in a week or so. I could probably get a stronger coffee flavour by adding espresso or drip coffee, but I'm concerned that the acidity would ruin the mouthfeel, which is important for an Oatmeal Stout.

The grain bill is a bit more complex than the ESB, with the base malt being 2-row malt and the supporting malts being roasted barley, chocolate malt and crystal 60 malt. The roasted barley will add a roasted coffee flavour as well as darken the beer, while the chocolate malt will provide a bittersweet chocolate flavour and also darken the beer. Since I'm making an Oatmeal Stout, I also used 1 lb of flaked oats, which makes up 10% of the grain bill. The flaked oats will provide a smooth, silky, creamy mouthfeel.

Since I stayed in Friday night for Valentines day, I decided to mill all of the grain in preparation of brew day the following day. It's sort of a long tedious task, so I entertained myself by taking a couple of selfies.

Brew day kicked off smoothly on Saturday and I made it my goal to stick to my recipe and ignore any second thoughts I may have. I used a strike temperature of 165 F and used 1.6 quarts of water per lb of grain, which equates to 4 gallons based on my grain bill. This time around I stirred and waited a couple minutes to take the settling temperature before making any adjustments. I ended up with a temperature of 154.9 F, which is slightly above the temperature I was targeting (154 F), but over the course of the 60 Min mash it should hold consistently.

I had some time to kill while I waited for the 60 Min mash to complete and I was home alone, so I had nothing better to do than bust a move to some Tokyo Police Club. Once the mash was complete, I transferred the wort to the brew pot, then added an additional 2 gallons of sparge water at a temperature of 170 F to get to a total of 6 gallons pre-boil. I did run into a bit of a stuck sparge situation as a result of the gumminess of the flaked oats, but I just stirred, recirculated again and continued to transfer to the brew pot. While I waited for the wort to get to a rolling boil, I took a sample and measured the boil original gravity (OG). It ended up being 1.040, which means I had an efficiency of 24 (40 X 6 (gallons of wort) / 10 (pounds of grain)). An efficiency of 28 is average, above 30 is great and below 25 is low. It means I'm not getting a good conversion in my mash, which could be caused by the grain being too coarse, the wrong temperature or not long enough of a mash.

Once the wort got to a rolling boil, I added 2 ounces of UK East Kent Golding pellet hops and gave it a good stir. I only added bittering hops at the start of the boil and no aromatic hops later on, as I just want the hops to balance out the sweetness and I'm not looking for any of the aromatic characteristics. In the last 5 minutes of the boil I added a whirlfloc clarifying tablet, which encourages the precipitation of haze. Once the 60 Min boil was complete, I cooled the wort in my bathtub to get it down to 70 F. I took another sample of the wort to measure the OG post boil, which ended up being 1.055, exactly the number I was targeting. I'll have to do a bit more reading on conversion efficiency, because even with a low efficiency, I still managed to hit the OG I was targeting. Sure helps when you stick to the recipe!

I transferred the wort from the brew pot to the primary fermenter through a strainer to aerate the wort, then added the Wyeast 1318 London Ale III Yeast. Now I wait for a week or until the fermentation is complete to rack to the secondary carboy. In the meantime, I need to decide on the type of coffee beans I want to add to the secondary.

Thanks for reading!

Bottling - 'Tis But A Scratch ESB

After my beer tasting at the Rhino on Sunday, I headed home and prepared my kitchen for a bottling session. Three weeks have passed since I brewed, fermentation is complete and it's time to transfer to bottles and cap for the last stage of the process, bottle conditioning.

The first thing that needs to be done prior to bottling is sanitizing all the equipment, including the bottles. This part of the process is definitely the most boring, but negligence to do so will in most cases ruin the beer. I just use a combination of Star San sanitizer and water with a bottle brush.

While I'm sanitizing the bottles, I siphon the beer from the food grade plastic fermenter into the glass carboy. This is primarily to filter out any of the remnants like hops, grain and spent yeast left in the beer.

While siphoning into the carboy, I take a sample of the beer to measure the final gravity (FG). If you reference back to the original blog when I brewed the beer, you'd see that my target FG was 1.020. The actual FG ended up being 1.010, which is quite a bit lower. Running the numbers between the original gravity (OG), which was 1.065 and the final gravity, the beer ended up with an ABV of ~6.4%. According to the BJCP style guidelines, this is slightly outside of the acceptable ABV range (4.6 - 6.2%) for an ESB. I saw this coming as soon as I finished brewing as the OG was 0.06 higher than targeted and I didn't trust recipe mid brew and went a little rogue. I didn't gather the right amount of wort post mash, which left me with a reduced batch size, throwing off all my numbers quite a bit.

After the beer is siphoned into the carboy, I washed and sanitized the plastic bucket in preparation of using it as the bottling bucket. I add my priming solution into the bucket, which is a mixture of 2 cups of water and 4 ounces of dextrose (glucose) boiled, then cooled to room temperature. Priming solution is used for bottle conditioning to reactive the yeast and create carbonation in the bottles. 4 ounces of dextrose is potentially excessive for the carbonation level in an ESB, but I've had issues with getting good carbonation recently. Afterwards, I siphon the beer back into the bottling bucket, on top of the priming solution, gently mixing the two.

Now I'm ready to begin filling the bottles. I use the Ferrari Automatic bottle filler, which sounds cool and looks cool, but I would not recommend it. Perhaps I just haven't figured out how to properly use it, but it always creates an absolute mess.

Once all the bottles are filled, I began capping. I use the standard Ferrari hand clamp bottle capper used by many beginner home brewers. Here is where I ran into quite the roadblock: 

 I could not for the life of me clamp a bottle cap onto the 12 Beau's bottles I had filled. I had to carefully empty all of the Beau's bottles back into the bottling bucket, cover the bucket and frantically search for some pry top bottles to fill with the remaining beer. An issue that I could see happening here is oxidation from being exposed for so long prior to bottling, as well as increased chance of bacteria infection, neither of which is good. Once I found more bottles, I sanitized them, filled them and finished capping. I ended up with quite the motley crew of bottles

The bottles are currently doing their thing in my closet, while I patiently wait for 2 weeks to pass and the bottle conditioning to be complete. The timeline lines up perfectly with the Olympic gold medal men's hockey game! *knock on wood*

I'll wait until I try the beer to pass judgement, but I've already learned quite a few lessons after my first all grain brew. First, stick to the recipe and track everything along the way, otherwise the numbers won't match up and it becomes near impossible to replicate. Second, don't attempt to adjust the temperature in the mash before it settles. Third, don't use Beau's bottles!

Thanks for reading!

Beer Tasting - Black Damnation

Today was bottling day, but I didn't have any pry top bottles on hand. The Rhino, a local beer bar in Parkdale seemed like my best bet to pick up some bottles. I decided to kill two birds with one stone and do a beer tasting as I remember drinking a beer there on my birthday that was very complex. Black Damnation is a Russian Imperial Stout from De Struise Brouwers, located in Oostvleternwhich, Belgium. In 2008 the brewery was declared the best brewery in the world by the members of RateBeer. Struise is very small with an output of a mere 900 hectolitres per year and this particular beer is part of an experimental project where the brewery tries different blends and aging techniques.
 

I'll be following the five category format from beeradvocate.com: Appearance, Smell, Taste, Mouthfeel and Overall.  

Appearance: Pours pitch black, with a thick creamy head and has quite long retention.

Smell: Black currant, raisin and black licorice.

Taste: Black licorice and espresso notes are very heavy at the start, followed by dark fruit, raisin and a slight sourness. Can tell that the beer is heavily hopped as the sweetness is cut quickly and it finishes dry with a little residual sweetness.

Mouthfeel: Velvety smooth with a slight tingle from the effervescence. A creaminess to early sips from the thick head. Warmth comes from each sip due to the higher ABV.

Overall: This is a great beer. It's the kind of beer you want to sip by the fireside on a cold winter day. I don't think I could drink more than one as it's so full bodied and with an ABV of 13% I'd start seeing double pretty quickly. The Rhino has a great beer list, but struggles to keep a lot of their rarities in stock. I'm not sure if The Rhino's regular patrons just don't know about Black Damnation, but they have always had some on hand and that is enough to keep me coming back.

Thanks for reading!