Russian Imperial Honey Stout

Saturday was a very exciting brew day with the debut of my first mash tun!

This 5 gallon beverage cooler is the beginning of moving away from extract syrup and towards all grain brewing.

I’ll keep using the syrup for the bulk of my fermentable sugars since I only got about 50% efficiency on this first mash. But that’s ok because we added a pound and a half of honey to make up for it. I doubt the honey flavor will come through the dark malts and all the hops in this recipe, but it will up the alcohol a bit. This is my biggest beer yet, so I have no idea how long it will take before its drinkable (hopefully it takes less than 6 months to condition).

Mash:

5 lb British mild ale/stout malt (2.5^o L)

1 lb Crystal (90^o L)

0.5 lb Vienna malt

1 lb Chocolate malt (British)

1 lb oat flakes

0.5 roasted barley

I added in 4 gallons (half bottled water, half tap water) of water (165^o F?) and the mixture stabilized at 151^o F. After an hour, I added a half gallon of boiling water to thin out the mash and up the temperature a bit, and then started draining into the brew pot. I did a batch sparge with 165^o F water (forgot to write down the volume, 2 gallons?) to make sure I got as much sugar out as possible. The gravity of this was around 1.026.

Boil Schedule:

Bittering hops (60 minutes): 1 oz Chinook plugs @14% alpha acid

Flavoring hops (30 minutes): 2 oz Northern Brewer pellets @ 6% alpha acid

For the last 15 minutes of the boil, I added 4 lbs Alexanders Pale Extract (liquid), 1.5 lbs of Greg’s honey (Doylestown wild flower?) and about 2 tsp of yeast nutrients.

Aroma hops (10 minutes): 1 oz Cascade plugs @ 8.7% alpha acid

O.G. 1.075

The boil may have lasted longer than 60 minutes, so this may be a pretty bitter brew. We're at the upper end of the bitter scale with about 100 IBUs and at the low end of the gravity scale. Should be an interesting beer.

Waiting for good results

I finally tried the red ale turned amber ale that I brewed in early October. I brewed on the 3rd and did not taste until the 30th. In this case, waiting longer to drink the beer turned out the be a good idea. Nick and Greg actually kegged the beer a week or so after brewing and panicked when they tasted it. The descriptions I got included "tastes wine-like," "over extracted grains," and "kind of funky." I was kind of bummed that it looked like a failed brew, but I thought if we waited a bit longer, the beer would figure itself out and get to tasting right. Fortunately that turned out to be the case, and from looking around on the internet and re-reading some of my old brewing notes, it seems to be the trend. The longer you let the beer sit, the better. As Alton Brown always says: Your patience will be rewarded. As far as I can tell, the more stuff you throw into a beer during brewing, the longer it takes for all the flavors to get sorted out and settle into a palatable beverage.

Anyway, I tasted the beer on Friday without making any tasting notes but here is my memory of the beer:

It poured kind of a murky brown, probably because I forgot to add the irish moss and no one wanted to experiment with using egg whites as a fining agent. Oh well. Now we know officially that it is an amber ale and not a red ale. The head was pretty creamy with small bubbles. The retention was good but not great. The smell was not very strong, I think the keggerator is a bit too cold for this dark of a beer. The taste was mostly the toasted malts and it finished with a nice bitterness. The bitterness was a cross from what you would expect from the hops plus the burnt grains. I liked it. There was not a great hop presence, but every now and then I could taste the hop pellets. The only strange thing was the smell as I drank the beer. Once the glass was about half empty, I could really get my nose in there. The smell was weird. There was a weird fruit (cherry maybe?) and a little bit of funk. Maybe this will disappear, maybe not.

Over all, I am pleased with the way it turned out. I just need to keep in mind the impatient people brewing with me. Either I need to find beers that are quick from grain to glass, or convince them to wait for the beer to be ready before drinking.