Choco-Coffee Imperial Stout

A few years back my friend Jim did a great Founders Breakfast Stout clone. I still remember it fondly and decided to brew one myself. I pretty much stuck to Jim's recipe. I brewed this last a week ago, but just got around to posting. It was racked to secondary this afternoon and is tasting great even before the additional coffee and chocolate additions were made!


Choco-Coffee Imperial Stout (Founder's Breakfast Stout clone)

brewed on: 10/30/11
OG: 1.080
IBUs: 34 IBUs
SRM:  47
mash temp: 155F

mash:
10 lbs US 2-row
7 lbs Marris Otter
1.5 lbs Flaked Oats (Quaker quick oats)
1 lb Chocolate Malt
12 oz Roasted Barley (300 SRM)
8 oz Special B
4 oz Black Patent
4 oz Carafa II

3 gm chalk


Hops (all loose pellets):
33 gm Nugget @ 13% AA - 60 minutes
14.17 gm Williamette @ 5.1% - 5 minutes
14.17 gm Williamette @ 5.1% - flameout





 
Adjuncts:
3 oz Bittersweet Chocolate - boil, 5 minutes
2 oz roughly ground coffee beans (medium roast) - flameout
2 oz Bitter baking chocolate - secondary (14 days)
1 oz roughly ground coffee beans (medium roast) - secondary (14 days)


Yeast:
2 packs US-05, rehydrated

Apple Brandy Barrel Aged Wheat Wine

I recently acquired an apple brandy barrel from Aeppeltreow cidery & distillery. This is some of the best brandy I've tried, with beautiful spice and fruit notes to it! The barrel echoes these, with an even more intense savory spiced aroma than the brandy itself. The barrel is around 26 gallons, which is more than I want to brew myself, so I recruited some friends from the B.O.M.B. (Barrel of Monkeys Brewers) group I started last year for group barrel projects. My friend Bob has a delicious Wheat Wine he brewed, based mostly off of one of the recipes in Stan Hieronymous's Brewing With Wheat. We decided it would be a great beer to age in the barrel. Along with Bob, Jim, Dan, and John, I brewed a batch of the wheat wine and we filled the barrel a week ago, along with a hefty amount of sampling of homebrew & commercial beers! A good time was had by all.

Barrel Aged Wheat Wine

brewed on: 9/16/11
OG: 1.110
IBUs: 75 IBUs
SRM:  11
mash temp: 156F

mash:
17.25 lbs Marris Otter
7.42 lbs White Wheat malt
1.36 lbs Aromatic malt
0.7 lbs Carapils
0.7 lbs Flaked Wheat


Hops (all loose pellets):
83.7 gm Centennial @ 8.7% - 90 minutes
25.6 gm Amarillo @ 7.5% - 30 minutes
43.66 gm Cascade @ 5.4% - 10 minutes
41.45 gm Cascade @ 5.4% - flameout

Yeast:
US-05 - 1 pack, rehydrated
Munich dry yeast - 1 pack, rehydrated


11/4/11 - Sample is showing nice clove and apple notes from the brandy barrel. Oak complexity is at a great level. We're shooting to empty asap, which is still 3 weeks off since we're brewing this week. Hopefully it doesn't get over-oaked. I'm really looking forward to this beer!

Second Runnings Beer - Thomas Hardy barleywine

For the second runnings beer from my Thomas Hardy inspired barleywine, I capped the mash with a bit more grain. Unfortunately, it ended up picking up an infection from the dry hops (I don't know why I bothered using a bag on this one when I usually don't for pellets.) I'm 100% sure it came from the nylon hop bag. It was a bland beer anyway, so no huge loss. I've got a Brett Blend #9 pitch from East Coast Yeast on its way, which I may pitch to see what happens, but I'm not expecting much. By the time the bugs are done I'll have a beer that had little malt character, old hops (by that time) and a bunch of brett. Doesn't soundvery good, or balanced, to me. Anyway, for the sake of recording recipes, I capped the mash with the following:


12 oz Crystal 60L
6 oz Crystal 120L
6 oz Pale Chocolate malt


hops:
0.9 oz Nugget @ 13% - 60 minutes
0.5 oz Challenger @ 5.3% - 15 minutes
0.5 oz Challenger @ 5.3% - flameout


yeast:
WY London ESB - half slurry from English Mild

Thomas Hardy inspired Barleywine

Although I didn't brew much over the summer, as usual, I've brewed a few beers since my last post and really slacked about recording them! I've intended to do an all-base grain barleywine, inspired by the delicious Thomas Hardy's Ale. A few friends and I each picked up a sack of Marris Otter in preparation. I was considering using a Bavarian Lager yeast for awhile, after reading a report that that's what Eldridge Pope brewery used to use, but went with a combination of Wyeast London ESB yeast (the Fuller's strain) and Nottingham. I love the character of the Fuller's yeast, and added the Notty since I know it can handle high gravity well.

I made this brew using first-runnings only, and had a tough time hitting my mid-1.120s OG I was shooting for. In the end I topped it off with 3 lbs of DME. I used the yeast slurry from my English Mild, split it in 2, and used half for the second runnings beer. The pack of Notty was pitched into the primary along with the slurry.

Barleywine

brewed on: 8/28/11
OG: 1.127
IBUs: 64
SRM: 10
mash temp: 150F

mash:
35 lbs Marris Otter
Hops (all loose pellets):
2.5 oz Nugget @ 13% - 60 minutes
1 oz Fuggles - 10 minutes


Yeast:
WY 1968 London ESB- 1/2 yeast cake from English Mild
1 pack Nottingham


5/2/12 - I tasted a sample of this the other day out of the secondary and it is tasting amazing! The malt character is just what I'd hoped for with a sweetness level right around the actual Thomas Hardy beers I've tried! I'm thinking about bottling it soon!

English Mild

I haven't brewed very many English inspired beers, and the majority of those have been along the lines of an Old ale here and Barleywine there. There was a bretted brown porter awhile back that is coming along nicely, and there was a pretty bad attempt at an ESB-esque creation with whatever I had on hand at one point. With that in mind, I picked up a pack of WY 1968 ESB yeast. This is the Fuller's strain and I love Fuller's. I plan to use it along with a pitch of stronger yeast to do a strong barleywine along the lines of Thomas Hardy next week. To get a big enough pitch of yeast ready, I brewed a dark Mild today. Here is my recipe:

English Mild

brewed on: 8/21/11
OG: 1.036
IBUs: 21.8 IBUs
SRM:  supposedly 16.7, but I think mine looks a little darker than that. We'll have to wait and see.
mash temp: 156F

mash:
6 lbs Marris Otter
1 lb Carastan (30-35L)
8 oz Pale Chocolate malt (200L)
6 oz Brown malt
4 oz Crystal 120L

Hops (all loose pellets):
0.9 oz Fuggles @ 5.1%  - 60 minutes
1 oz Fuggles @ 5.1% - 10 minutes

Yeast:
WY 1968 ESB - 1.6 liter starter, decanted.

Rum Barrel Aged Black Currant Melomel

My first attempt at an oak aged mead turned out great when I put it in my peach brandy barrel this past spring. On the heels of that tasty batch, I decided to try another melomel in the 5 gallon rum barrel I recently acquired. I've been curious about black currants in mead since watching the Brew TV episode where Curt Stock is interviewed. Apparently that is a favorite fruit addition of his. Here is my recipe:

Rum Barrel Aged Black Currant Melomel

brewed on: 8/6/11
Batch size: 5 gallons


honey:
15 lbs Wildflower honey

Fruit:
96oz. black currant juice (Vintner's Harvest)

Yeast:
25g - 71B Narbonne dry yeast, rehydrated and fed using the Minnesota Speed Mead method.

11/28/11 - bottled

Lambic barrels!

I've posted before about the group barrel projects I've been taking part in since last fall. It is finally time to drain our initial barrel of its contents, a sour Belgian Imperial Stout. We'll also be emptying our Rye Porter from the Zinfandel barrel it has been aging in.

In place of these beers the plan is to ferment a lambic-like beer in the barrels. Barrel #1 already has more than enough yeast and bugs from the 5 gallons of starter I inoculated it with last year. It was fermented half on Roselare and half on Bugfarm from East Coast Yeast. Barrel #2, which we've dubbed 'Rosie' probably doesn't have enough living in it to do the job of primary fermentation though. It has a mild brett strain living in it, but doesn't exhibit enough brett character (or any sourness) to make me think that there is enough population or variety of bugs for lambic fermentation. That being the case, I brewed a 10 gallon starter batch into which I pitched Wyeast Lambic Blend. I also mixed together dregs from bottles of Hansen's, Cantillon, and Boon Gueuze which some friends and I polished off while I was brewing.

For the starter batch I used the following recipe:

Lambic Solera Bug Starter

batch size: 10 gallons

brewed on: 7/3/11
OG: 1.047
IBUs: 0 IBUs (?)
mash temp: 158F
expected color: 3.6 SRM
90 minute mash
90 minute boil

mash:
10 lbs German pils malt
5 lbs German wheat malt
2 lbs flaked oats

Hops:
4 oz debittered Crystal & Willamette whole leaf

Yeast:
WY Lambic blend, dregs from Cantillon Gueuze, Boon Gueuze, Hansen's Gueuze, and Lindeman's Cuvee Rene


We'll be filling the barrels each half-way with wort brewed on 7-17-11. Six of us will provide wort that day. One week later, the rest of the group will be brewing the rest and topping the barrels up. We'll then rack off 5 gallons from each barrel to allow for headspace during primary fermentation. Once that has calmed down, the beer will be racked back to the barrels to top them up.


I've ordered debittered, aged hops for use in this project. Since they aren't here yet though, I experimented with quickly oven-aging them. I started at 170F, the lowest my oven will go, and slowly raised the temp up to around 190F over the course of 4 hours. The house smelled really cheesy and stale by the time I was done. It took a couple days to air out.


For the rest of the batches, we'll be using the following grist:


12 lbs pils
3 lbs wheat malt
2 lbs unmalted wheat
2 lbs flaked oats


Rather than doing a ridiculously long, but traditional turbid mash, we're mashing at 158F to provide some more complex sugars for the secondary fermentation, along with everything the unmalted wheat and oats will be adding. I amended the recipe after brewing my batch with 10 lbs of pils to help raise the gravity a bit. I realized it was a bit on the low side!


The plan is to use these 2 barrels 'solera' style, and draw off half every 8 or 12 months, replacing that with 5 gallons per brewer of fresh wort. This will keep the batch going and simulate the blending of older beer with younger in traditional gueuze. While not as refined as the traditional blending process, it seems like a fun starting place for our further exploration of sour barrel aged beers by the Barrel Of Monkeys Brewers!