Imperial Stout

Last Saturday I brewed my 2nd to last extract brew. An Imperial Stout that I got from Northern Brewer.

Here is the run-down of the recipe:

• 0.5 lbs Roasted Barley
• 0.5 lbs Black Malt
• 0.5 lbs Chocolate Malt
  
• 12 lbs Amber Malt Syrup
  
• 1 oz Galena (60 min)
• 1 oz Fuggles (45 min)
• 1 oz Willamette (10 min)
  
• Wyeast #1728 Scottish Ale Yeast
  

A few days before brewday I took the yeast out of the fridge and made a 1 liter starter with it. To make the starter I just took a cup of dry malt extract and added it to 900 ml of boiling water. I let it boil for about 15 minutes and then crash cooled it in the sink. I pitched the yeast in when the temp had fallen to 70 degrees and let it ferment out for a few days. I ended up with a nice slurry of yeast on the bottom of the flask and some really bad mini-beer.




Next I had to deal with the grains. I had a pound and a half of grains that needed to be crushed. In prior brews I had put the steeping grains in a zip-lock back and attempted to crush them with a rolling pin. It worked, kind of. Now I have my lovely barley crusher, so I used that to crush the grains.

After crushing, the grains had a nice coffee like aroma to them. They also turned everything they touched black. Since I'm looking to gain color from them, that's a good thing. The dog was disappointed though. On the last brew, I used honey malt for flavor and the dog acted like it was candy. She loved it. She took one sniff of these and turned up her nose. No accounting for taste I guess.

With all my prep work done, it was time to start making the beer. I do all my brewing out on the back porch with a patio burner. I used to use filtered water from the fridge in the kitchen, but I'm lazy and that took too long. For the last couple of brews I've been using tap water from the faucet out back. I use a food grade hose, so the water doesn't taste like rubber and I haven't seen any detrimental affects from the tap water.

I add about 7 gallons of water to the pot in the hope that I will end up with 5-5.5 gallons. I start the flame and start waiting. When adjusted properly the burner will get 7 gallons of water to a boil in about 30 minutes. Today, I had the flame too low and had to adjust it after 20 minutes. Once I did that things started moving along. While that was happening, I retired to the kitchen and put a quart and a half of water on the stove. I let that warm up to 165 degrees, then removed it from the stove, added the steeping grains, covered, and then placed it in a tent made of towels to keep the heat in. I let that sit for 30 minutes. Once that was done, I added it to my now boiling water outside.

Now it's time to start adding ingredients. I have everything out and ready.

The extract:

The hops:

I add the malt extract to the boiling water. Slowly. malt extract is thick, it has a molasses like consistency and takes quite a while to get out of the jugs. Once the majority of it is out of the jug, I add some of the hot water and give it a good shake. That helps me get every last drop out of there. I turn the flame off while I do this to help prevent boil-over. The water reacts quite violently when you add the extract and it's easy to get the pot to boil over. That's one of the reasons I'm no longer allowed to do this in the kitchen. The other is the smell. As soon as you add the extract, it puts out a strong smell of malt and sugar. It's overpowering and lingers for hours. I think that more than anything got me kicked out of the house.

I start the flame back up and wait until I have a nice rolling boil. I do this uncovered as the boiling wort will give off Dimethyl Sulfides. If the pot was covered these chemical compounds would collect on the lid and drip back into the pot, being reabsorbed by the wort. This leads to a vegetable like taste that is often associated with cooked corn or cabbage. I like corn as much as the next guy, but I don't want my beer to taste like it!

Once I have a nice rolling boil, I put in the Galena hops and start an hour timer. You'll note in the recipe that all the hop additions have a time marked next to them. This tells you when to add them to the wort. Wort is typically boiled for 60 mins, so the hop additions are marked by how much time is left in the boil. So being marked at 60 mins, means you throw them in with 60 minutes left of the boil, so the 45 minutes addition would be 15 minutes later, the 30 minute would be 15 after that, etc. Pretty easy, but seems backwards at first.

Not much to do while the wort is boiling, so I start sanitizing equipment for the later steps. First up I get a 6.5 gallon acid carboy out and start sanitizing it.

And of course, my help helper is there at every step of the way. Mostly getting under foot and trying to see if she can kill me with the glass carboy.

I also get the wort chiller out and ready to go. I use an immersion chiller (IC). The IC works by running tap water through a copper coil that is immersed in the wort. This acts as a big heat sink and carries the heat away in the water. It uses a lot of water, but works well and gets my boiling wort to 70 degrees in about 40 minutes. I don't bother sanitizing it, I just throw it in the pot with about 20 minutes left in the boil. That kills all the nasties on it.

Once the boil is done and the wort has been chilled, it's time to put it in the carboy. So I grab my trusty (and freshly sanitized) auto-siphon and start moving the wort from the kettle to the carboy. It takes a good 15 minutes to transfer, but it's easier than trying to lift and pour the kettle without spilling it. I use the opportunity to grab a sample and get a hydrometer reading. I ended up with a reading of 1.087. A pretty big beer. I tasted the sample out of curiousity. Yuck! Too sweet! Should be much better once the yeast have had a chance to do their work.

Once all the wort is in the carboy, it's time to bring it inside for the next step. With a beer this big, healthy fermentation is important. So I am taking lots of steps to ensure the yeast have everything they need to thrive. As I showed above, I created a starter to make sure I had enough yeast, now I am aerating to make sure the yeast have enough O2 to do the job. O2 helps the yeast build thick cell walls, this enables them to withstand the highly acidic environment and helps them multiply better. If the walls are too thin, they will die upon multiplying. I use an aquariam pump attached to a stainless steel diffusion stone. There is an inline filter in there to make sure I don't pull bacteria out of the air. I let this run for 45 minutes to an hour to put plenty of 02 in to the solution.

Once that is done I pitch my yeast and let them do their work! I place the carboy into a bath tub of water to keep the temperature around 65 and then I wait, and wait, and wait. That's it. Simple!