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!

Hockey and Brew

For now, I'm way too excited and nervous to post much on the Canes as they play against New Jersey in the first round. One minute they look great, the next they give the game away. It's too stressing to write about.

Brewing beer however, is not! You can't possibly stress too much about a process that takes weeks, can you? Well yeah, you definitely can, but thankfully I'm not right now. As of yesterday, The Schitz! Barleywine has reached it's Final Gravity of 1.022, and will just sit in the Primary for another week to clean up a bit. It may even drop another thousandth of a point of two. Then it's off to the Secondary for about 6 weeks. That all means that I will have an empty primary in a week. Well now I can't have that!

Jennifer's Cherry Wheat to the rescue! My wife (SWMBO) loves Sam Adams' Cherry Wheat, so I'm going to try to the best of my ability, plus some creative leeway, to clone it for her. This would normally fall under the American Wheat style of beer, but since it will have cherries in it, it's technically a fruit beer.

The recipe is as follows.

• 3.3 lbs of Wheat Liquid Malt Extract
• 3.3 lbs of Extra Pale Dry Malt Extract
• 3 lbs of pureed cherries
• .5 oz. Centennial hops at 60 min
• .25 oz Centennial at 20 min
• .25 oz. Centennial at 7 min
• 1 package of Wyeast 1010 American Wheat Yeast.

Calculating the Starting Gravity, as well as the final Alcohol content will be hard because of the added sugars from the cherries. The color would normally be very light, but with the addition of cherries, it may add some red, along with some darkening to the beer. Plus, as an added bonus, SWMBO will be out of town this weekend, so she won't even have to smell the brew as it's cooked. Yay for her!

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.