Building an Irish Stout

My recent foray back to the first type of beer I brewed had me thinking about another beer I'd like to try to improve on: the Dry Irish Stout. This was another extract kit I bought from Northern Brewer. Rather than revisit the kit, I thought I'd build a recipe from scratch. After all, Irish stout's are pretty basic beers. The one thing I really want out of this is to make it finish very very dry in order to bring the roasted barley flavor to the forefront. So I sat down in front of Beersmith at lunch today and banged out a quick recipe.

9 lbs of Maris Otter Pale Malt. This is a nice English base malt. Perfect for this type of beer.
2.57 lbs of Roasted Barley. This is going to give us that nice dark color as well as a roasted barley flavor.
1.3 lbs of Flaked Barley. This is going to add proteins to the beer, producing a thick body and help in head formation/retention.
1.00 oz Northern Brewer [8.50%] at 60 mins. Nice bittering hop.
1.00 oz East Kent Goldings [5.00%] at 20 mins. Classic English hop. Should add just a touch of flavor and aroma.
Will use either Wyeast 1084 or 1056. I've heard too many people say that 1084 introduces too much diacetyl and even one report of a pineapple flavor. I may stick to the nice neutral chico yeast for the first go around.

That gave me the basic recipe to start with, but I really want that dry finish. So I tweaked it a little more:

5 lbs of Maris Otter Pale Malt.
2 lbs of Corn Sugar. Will have minimal affect on flavor, but will help lower the final gravity.
2.57 lbs of Roasted Barley.
1.3 lbs of Flaked Barley.
1.00 oz Northern Brewer [8.50%] at 60 mins.
1.00 oz East Kent Goldings [5.00%] at 20 mins.
Wyeast 1084 or 1056.

Basically, I am still aiming for an OG of 1.050 but am using 2 lbs of Dextrose (Corn Sugar) to get there instead of relying solely on the grains. I dropped the Maris Otter down to 5 lbs to compensate. The sugar is 100% fermentable unlike the sugars contributed by the grains. This will bring the final gravity down lower and really high-light the roasted grains. I might throw a small handful of Black Patent in there too and ignore it's gravity contributions. But maybe I'll keep it simple this time and just go with this basic recipe and tweak it after I've tasted the final product.

Amber Again...

My very first attempt at making beer was an Amber Ale extract kit from Northern Brewer. As certain people can attest, this beer was not good. It was down right awful. Of the paltry 35 bottles of the stuff I made, I think I still have 25 left. I have a feeling they will sit there unloved until I finally get around to dumping them out and using the bottles.

I still like the idea of having a nice Amber ale around, so I decided to have another go at this one. I figured I'd made a good amount of progress in my brewing skills and can better control fermentation temps now. So I picked up another Amber Ale kit from Northern Brewer. This time I went for an all grain kit, rather than extract. That alone will guarantee that this tastes different from the first one.

I brewed this up on the 4th of July in the early morning. I started at 7 am to beat the heat, but it was still scorching hot by the time I finished up around noon.

I missed my OG by 3 points, was expecting 1.047 got 1.044. This was due to overshooting my water amount a bit. I ended up with almost 5 1/2 gallons of water in the carboy and left another 1/2 gallon of break material in the kettle.

5 days later and fermentation is starting to die down. Looking forward to seeing how this turned out. Keeping my fingers crossed.