Friday, February 8, 2008

Oatmeal Coffee Stout - Recipe Idea

As many of you are aware, I loves me some coffee and I loves me some oatmeal stout. Thus, it is only natural that I would want to make an oatmeal coffee stout. I've looked around and found a few recipes, but I've decided to try to devise my own. Here's what I'm thinking:

Ingredients:
- 6.6 lbs. dark liquid malt extract
- 0.5 lbs. black patent malt
- 0.5 lbs. roasted barley
- 1 lbs. flaked oats
- 1 qt. strong coffee, freshly brewed (8 tbsp of fresh grounds, Italian/dark roast)
- 2 oz. of Galena hops for boiling (or similar, 13% alpha acid)
- 0.5 oz. of U.K. Fuggles hops for aroma
- Irish Ale liquid yeast (preferrably WhiteLabs, Nottingham Ale dry as backup)

Procedure:
I'm thinking I will roast the oats first, to get a nice roasty/toasty flavor. This will be done in the oven at 350F for about 30 min., moving the oats around every 5 minutes or so to keep them from burning.
Steep the grains and oats in 2 gallons of water at 150F for 45-60 min. Remove, then add extract and boiling hops and boil for 60 min. Add aroma hops for the last couple minutes of the boil. Add cooled wort and cooled coffee to fermenter containing 2 gallons of cold water and top off with more water to make 5 gallons. Pitch yeast when temperature is appropriate. Bottle once fermentation is complete (1-2 weeks).

I used this handy-dandy calculator to figure out what to expect from this recipe, and to make sure it falls within the definition of an Oatmeal Stout. I had to adjust the hops a little, but other than that, the recipe was spot on. Go me!

Here's what to expect from this recipe. Unfortunately the link above isn't quite robust enough to include coffee added to the fermenter, so I've put (estimated) adjusted values in parentheses next to the calculated values.

OG: 1.054 (1.056)
FG: 1.015
ABV: 5.0% (5.3%)
Color: ~48 SRM (50 SRM)
Bitterness: 29 IBU (33 IBU)

I did way too much research on the different kinds of oats available for this. Most brew shops sell "flaked oats" which I've found is basically the equivalent of Quaker "Old Fashioned" Oats. They have been processed to a point where they have already been gelatinized and don't require boiling like other less-processed forms (groats, steel cut, etc.).

My dad brought up a good point about the coffee affecting the pH of the wort, but after doing some calculations I've determined that it's not going to have much of an impact on the pH of the wort.

As for yeast, I want to give liquid yeast a shot, specifically the Irish Ale strain since it's the best for stouts. However, I don't really have the equipment or motivation for doing yeast starters so unless I can get some pitchable liquid yeast I will just use the Nottingham Ale dry yeast.

As for the Armenian Imperial Stout, it's still fermenting. Bubbles are occurring every 30 seconds now and there's a nice malty/hoppy/beery aroma emanating from the fermentation lock, so all is going well.

Update: I fixed some stuff in the recipe, specifically not boiling the coffee with the wort as it will affect the flavor/aroma of the coffee. Also added OG, FG, etc.

Update 2: Updated coffee roast/amount, added comments about pH, added yeast comments.

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