Bottling - "Breakfast of Champions" Oatmeal Coffee Stout

I bottled the Oatmeal Coffee Stout on Saturday, March 1st, so I'm a bit delayed with this writeup. So far everything seems to have gone perfectly with this beer. On Saturday, February 22nd I checked the Gravity and it was already down to 1.016. With an Original Gravity of 1.055, that gives me an ABV of 5.1%.

At this point the beer looks to be fully fermented, so I'm free to toy with it as I please prior to bottling. With this beer, I've decided to add half a pound of dark roast coffee beers that I picked up at Starbucks. As I mentioned during the initial brewing blog for this beer, I decided to use whole beans rather than drip coffee or espresso as I didn't want the acidity to throw off the mouth feel. I simply added the beans to the glass carboy and racked the beer on top of them. Finally, I added the rubber stopper and the airlock and set it aside for another weak to let the coffee beans infuse with the beer.

After the additional week passed, it was time to taste the beer and bottle. The beer had good roasty and chocolate flavours and I could definitely smell and taste the coffee. It's hard to tell if I achieved the velvety smooth mouthfeel that's so key with an oatmeal stout, so I'll have to wait for the final result to find that out. This time around the bottling was going much smoother, until part of my bottle capper broke off. Luckily I was still able to finish capping the bottles, I just had to apply more downward pressure. On the bright side this gave me an excuse to buy a heavy duty bench capper.

As you can see in the final picture, I've started making very creative labels for my beer. I picked up 55 packs of report cover labels at the local Parkdale Dollarama for $1 each and wrote OCS for Oatmeal Coffee Stout on each bottle. I'm basically doing this so I can tell the difference between all the different beers I'm brewing, but I also think it adds a nice touch.

Thanks for reading!