The Milk Chocolate Stout

This past Saturday was a big one in terms of brewing for me.

First, a week before I got a new toy.




A brand new Turkey Fryer! This thing will be great. No longer will SWMBO's nose curl from boiling wort in the kitchen. Boiling outside will cut that out. Plus, with a 30 quart pot, I can do full boils now.

With full boils, I will get better hop utilization, which means I need less hops for more bitterness and flavor. Plus, there will be less off-flavors from the extract I use.


Win/Win/Win.


So, this past Saturday, I kicked the outdoor brewing off by starting up my Milk Chocolate Stout.


Here's the recipe.

• 4.5 lbs of Extra Pale Dry Malt Extract.
• 1 lb of Chocolate Malt
• 12 oz. of Crystal 60L Malt
• 4 oz of Roasted Barley
• 1 oz of Black Patent Malt
• 1 lb of Dextrose
• 1 lb of Lactose (Milk Sugar, which is unfermentable, and will leave the beer sweeter)
• 1 oz of Cluster hops at 60 min.
• I used a starter of Wyeast 1028 London Ale Yeast.
  

The whole process started with making the starter a few days before:

Then steep the grains for 30 minutes at 150 degrees. Here's how we looked after steeping.

Here's the hot break after the boil started. Fortunately, I use Fermcaps so I won't be having any boilovers.

The one and only hop addition at 60 minutes:

My starting gravity was actually a bit high at 1.061. I, along with Beersmith, had expected it to be closer to 1.055, but we shall see where the final gravity ends up. Hopefully, somewhere in the 1.014-1.019 range. It wouldn't be bad for this beer to have a bit of body to it.

In another week or so I'll transfer the Stout to the secondary and add in some baker's cocoa. Probably about 3 or 4 ounces. Hopefully, this should be a pretty sweet, chocolaty and roasted tasting beer.

Cheers!

Gravity Read

Just a quick update on The Schitze! Barleywine: I took a gravity measurement last night. It's specific gravity after a week and a half in the fermenter is 1.025. That's entirely not bad considering this brew started at a little over 1.100. Beersmith calculated that the target final gravity should be 1.022, so I am really close! There's still activity going on in the fermenter, so it's not done yet.

It really looks like making a starter helped a lot. Plus, the Imperial Blend from Wyeast seems to be getting the job done. Right now it's at 75% attenuation, but I'm betting that I can push this beer down to at least 1.020 and get 80% attenuation if it's in there for another week and a half.

Weekend Update

(Cue SNL's Weekend Update music)



So another busy weekend passes us by. Plenty to tell.



First, the Canes seem to be on a roll lately. At least a roll of beating crappier teams than themselves. They've now beaten the Isles, Lightning, and the Avalanche for further muddle the Eastern Conference Playoff race.

Next, the American Amber is finished and ready to drink! So I drank it! It's really not bad. Since it was my first recipe of jut throwing something together, I wasn't thinking it was going to be all that good. First of all, it's really light. In taste that is. I didn't really add enough malt to the brew when I first started with it, so it's kinda weak (maxed at about 3.5% ABV) and I probably could've added more hops to it as well. But since it was my first brew, I really had no where to start. I now know that if I have 28 IBU's (the higher the number the more bitter the beer, and 28 is not high). I think it was calculated out to have only 120 calories or so in each brew. That's what you can call a lite beer! So this can be my Bud Lite of my homebrews. You can pound these and never feel a bit of the alcohol, but it tastes a hell of a lot better than Bud.

I also bought Beersmith this weekend. It is awesome! You can create all of your own brews in this program. It's got pretty much any kind of ingredient you could possibly want. It calculates the expected color, ABV, bitterness, calories, original and final gravities, and a ton of other useful tools. You can send your water off to get tested by your city, plug in the numbers that you receive from them, and it will tell you how to adjust your brew accordingly to make better beer, based on your water. It has about 400 different beer profiles that you can match up to your recipe, so that you know that you are making the correct "style" of beer. It's an awesome tool. I've spent hours on it just messing around with recipes.


Finally, I bottled Tyler's Bachelor Party Pale Ale this weekend. It actually looks identical to the Amber, so thankfully I had some different color bottle caps for it. Hope you like Carolina Blue, Tyler. They didn't have Maple Leaf Blue. With the emptying of the Secondary Fermenter came the refilling of it with my Irish Red. It looks so awesome! You can really see the red coloring in it. It does look as though it may come out a little lighter in color when it's in a pint glass, but we'll wait and see. It's promising to be a very clear beer I believe.