Since winter will be close to over by the time my next few brews are done, I figured I'd brew a sessionable stout for the remaining cold weather. I've also been planning on brewing a high gravity beer sometime next week, and so a nice big pitch of yeast from a previous batch should help fermentation.
For the stout and next week's high gravity brew, I chose to go with Wyeast's 1028 London Ale yeast. The next four beers I plan on after the London ales will be two Scottish ales (Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale) and two Biere de Gardes (Wyeast 3725 Biere De Garde Private Collection).
Since I had yet to brew another stout since my second extract batch about two and a half years ago, I figured it was time to try another. This recipe came from The Jamil Show once again, and should roughly approximate Samuel Smith's Oatmeal stout, which is a classic interpretation on the style. Other than using East Kent Goldings for the single hop addition, this recipe should be consistent with Jamil's original.
English Oatmeal Stout
Batch Volume (Gal): 6.00
Pre-Boil Volume (Gal): (collected 6.33 gallons of wort from sparge; topped up kettle with 1/2 gallon of water)
Total Grain (Lbs): 12.9
OG: 1.056 Anticipated FG: ~1.014 Anticipated ABV: ~5.5%
IBUs: 35.8
SRM: 34.2
Brewhouse Efficiency: 72%
Boil Duration: 65 min
Grain (Lbs/oz.) (%)
British 2-row Pale Malt 9.4 72.9
Flaked Oats 1 7.8
Chocolate Malt 12 oz. 5.8
Victory Malt 12 oz. 5.8
Crystal 80 8 oz. 3.9
Roasted Barley 8 oz. 3.9
Hops (AA%) (IBU) (Oz.) (Boil[min])
East Kent Goldings 35.8 4.5 2 60
Yeast
Wyeast 1028 London Ale (pitched from Activator packet)
Water
1 tsp Calcium Chloride (65 min)
1 tsp Calcium Sulfate (65 min)
1 tsp Irish Moss (5 min)
1/2 yeast nutrient (5 min)
Today was the first time I had an excuse to use my larger mashtun, a 10 gallon rubbermaid cooler I picked up earlier this fall. Once I started getting into higher gravity all grain batches, I realized unfortunately (often while in the process of mashing in!) that my 5 gallon cooler was not going to hold all the water and grain I had hoped it would. The new mashtun however should hold more than enough grain for high ABV beers and session beers (like the Oatmeal Stout) that will not comfortably fit in the smaller mashtun.
I'm glad the first beer I brewed with the larger mashtun was a grain bill that was relatively easy to transfer. After forgetting to add 1 tbl of the 5.2 pH stabilizer, and hitting a lower than desired mash temperature of 150 F (I had aimed for 154 F but ended up hitting 155 F for 45 minutes of the 60 minute mash) I came to find out that my mash was stuck when it was finally time to sparge the grains. I spent about 10 minutes poking and prodding into the mash tun through the spigot, trying to pull whatever buildup of grain had been blocking the flow.
After that attempt failed, I was forced to dump all of the hot wort and grains into my boil kettle to see what the issue was with the false bottom. In my attempt to tighten the connections between all of the components of the false bottom, I had wrung the high temperature tubing running between my false bottom and the spigot into a tight knot. I was finally able to get a steady flow of wort out of the mashtun after unwinding the tubing and returning the mash to the mashtun.
Definitely more than a few problems today... On top of a few absentminded mistakes (forgetting to add the 5.2 stabilizer, forgetting to put a timer on after adding my hops to the boil) the issues with the new cooler were not very helpful. I'll have to figure out a way to keep a watertight seal in both the 5 gallon mashtun and the 10 gallon mashtun, two issues I've had for a while. I had not realized the extent to which the seal between the components loosens up when hot water is added to the coolers. I tighten these fixtures until I could not possibly tighten anymore, and yet after adding hot water to preheat the coolers or mashing in, I usually find a steady stream of liquid seeping from one of the many connections between the components. I'll also have to exchange the high temperature tubing I used today with a more sturdy high temp tubing that won't twist as well.
One positive that came out of the day however was that I saw the benefit of producing more wort than necessary for a 5 gallon batch. Rather than scaling the recipe down to 5 gallons, I chose to go with the recipe described in The Jamil Show episode on Oatmeal Stouts. The recipe was for 6 gallons of wort with the intention of leaving a 1/2 gallon in the kettle post-boil and another 1/2 gallon in the fermenter after fermentation, leaving a full 5 gallons of clean beer in the keg. Rather than tediously filtering wort away from the hop and protein trub after the boil, I only collected the wort that ran out of the spigot of my brew kettle. The spigot is located about an inch from the bottom of the kettle, and about 1/2 gallon of wort and trub was left behind after transferring the 5.5 gallons of clean wort to the fermenter. Not sure I'll make this a standard practice as it'll cost me a bit more when buying grain, but it sure made transferring the wort easier and will hopefully make the finished product taste better.
After this beer ferments through this next week at about 68 F, I plan on brewing up a high gravity beer in the traditional English Parti-gyle brewing technique, and I'll ferment using the yeast cake off of the Oatmeal Stout. Both my 5 gallon and 10 gallon mash tuns will be used to mash anywhere from 25 to the 30 pounds of grain needed for a high gravity beer. The high gravity ale I chose to brew will consist of the first runnings off of these two mash tuns, with a second more sessionable English IPA hopefully coming from the second runnings. It'll be an interesting experiment to see how difficult this technique can be and whether or not I can produce two separate beers in one brew session.
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