Attenuation: 72%

ABV: 6.43

I’ll let it sit in the carboy for a week before I bottle. I’ll take my next reading then.

Sunday Feb 12, 2006 Update: Loads of flocculation on bottom of carboy. Woo!

I really enjoy this style of beer for a variety of reasons. First, as a hophead, I love to be pelted in the nose by an overwhelming amount of hops when I get near a glass. Something about that just says beer to me. Next, IPAs always make me think of warm weather and sunny days. I can imagine sitting out on a warm evening drinking a pint. In the bar near college I used to have an IPA in the summer at happy hour while I ate wings. The hops really re-enforced the flavor in the sauce. That grassy flavor just reminds me of playing on a baseball field after the lawn was cut. I think this beer will be a perfect candidate for some aging (~2 months) before it’s ready to be consumed. With all that being said and my spidey senses tingling, let’s look at the lineup:

RECIPE

Specialty Grains

The notes say this malt is 30-37° L which would give the beer a reddish appearance? I may be wrong about this and I guess i’ll tell after I make the wort. The notes also indicate that this grain will contribute dextrins and add to head stability. Well, dextrins to boost body sound appropriate for an IPA. If a beer with this much flavor going on was missing body it would probably taste like wastewater.

Fermentable Sugars

I have used this much sugar in a recipe before. They must really be going for a serious O.G. in this recipe. Using this nifty homebrew calculator:

O.G. 1.064 to 1.075

That’s a nice big beer. I will certainly make a starter like I did last time. Fortunately, Northern Brewer ships Wyeast XL packs standard so my yeast will be off and running. Oh, there’s also the oxygen i’ll be injecting.

Hops

And did I mention it had hops? I’m still learning what these numbers actually mean. I was wrong in my previous post. The IBU for my last beer (Flagship Ale) was only 24.7. I’m looking at 2.4 times the amount of bitterness. Well, there’s alot more malt too, should be an experience.

I.B.U. = 59.4

I’ve worked with Kent Goldings and Fuggles before. I used the fuggles in the Original Porter and the Kent Goldings in either the Trippel or the Wheat Beer. The nugget are new ones for me. Here is what I found about those hop varieties:

Fuggle (UK) – AA% 4 to 5.5, robust and earthy
Kent Goldings (UK) – AA% 4 to 5.5, mild and pleasant, gentle
Nugget – AA% 11 to 14.5, heavy, herbal

Yeast

Medium flocculation, typical ale range, 72-76% attenuation. If all goes to plan that should give me a final gravity of 1.015 (76% attenuation). That translates into an ABV of 6.43%, not too shabby. We’ll see what the future holds for this one.

Alcohol By Volume (ABV) = 4.59375

Apparent Attenuation = 77.77%

Well, I’m happy with that. Of course I gave it a taste. At first I was skeptical. It had not much mouth feel, but I was also used to drinking beer with more body. I realized that I had not used nearly as much fermentable sugar in this recipe. Also, the hops were certainly present which came as a surprise. They were right about the honey, it really didn’t add body at all. Does this mean that meade has a light mouthfeel too?

So it’s racked over to the secondary. I’ll be taking it over to the keg this evening.

This entry was written many months after the actual brewing and consumption of the Oatmeal Stout. As such, it will not be very detailed and will mostly be what I remembered. This was my first in home brewing experience.

So after reading, studying and watching the Good Eats episode entited Amber Waves I decided to take the plunge into brewing. Fortunately, at the time I was working and living around greater Philadelpia and had access to lots of brewing help, mostly by word of mouth. I borrowed a True Brew kit from a friend of mine and proceeded to take my first attempt at homebrew.

Keystone Homebrew was recommended to me as a place to go and grab ingredients. I found the store owners to be more than helpful in guiding me along of path of zymurgy. My (now) Canadian friend ok_with_today and I decided on their oatmeal stout recipe feeling confident in our cooking skills.

Brew Day Impressions

Oatmeal Stout Recipe

By this point, I had the recipe and process memorized. I got my mis en place set up and proceeded as directed. I steeped the specialty grains, warmed the cans of extract and went at it. The yeast packet swelled to max size in a couple of hours. All the equipment was sanitized with a dilute bleach mixture. Our pace was swift, our determination unwavering. After two hours or so we had completed our first brew session. It was now up to the yeast.

Fermentation

I fermented in my closet. It seemed to me to fit the temperature range. I remember expecting to see activity that evening and I was concerned when I did not. By the next morning however, there were certainly bubbles starting to form. By Tuesday, the airlock was poppin. This made me very excited because it meant something was happening inside that bucket. I wasn’t sure if what was happening was good, but I knew at least it was a fertile breeding ground for the yeast. I had concerns over whether the sanitizing was complete enough.

Bottling

Two weeks elapsed to the day and we opened it up to find our oatmeal stout had successfully passed stage one of fermentation. I spent all morning sanitizing the bottles and all the equipment. Bottling was messy but a quick process after all. I think it took us nearly an hour to fill exactly 48 bottles. There was much rejoicing.

Tasting

Two weeks after that point (sometime in July 2005) came the fateful day we had been waiting for. I planned a special dinner and invited my girlfriend, ok_with_today and his new wife over for a dinner party/tasting. To our surprise we opened the bottles to find a perfectly crafted beer. It poured nicely, had great head retention though we noticed a slight twang that we were unable to explain. We chalked it up to first time and inexperience. It was certainly chocolately, decent hop presence. I had not taken a hydrometer reading so I didn’t have any idea how far it fermented. It was certainly full bodied and of course, tasted like oats. Truly a success for my first time. This got me hooked. I returned the borrowed kit to my friend and purchased my own. Thus began my homebrewing career.

IBU = 47.034

Gravity

The O.G. of this recipe came out at 1.045, a moderate number from my research. I know there are calculators online to estimate what your O.G. will be, but it’s just as easy to sanitize the players involved and measure it. Since the aim was fermentation efficiency, I acquired (from Santi Clause) an aeration stone on a 22” long stick, tubing and a regulator. I picked up a 1.4oz canister of oxygen from the local hardware store. I was determined to oxygenate-aerate (oxygenate) my wort. After sanitizing and drying off, I put it in and let her go full throttle.

First off, it whined like crazy. My poor cat, Mr. Earl Grey ran for the hills in a flash. My parents just looked at each other with the “we’ve raised a mad scientist” expression. I let it go for 50 seconds. The wort was rather bubbled. After that I unplugged the starter, flamed the lip, swirled the bottle and pitched it all. Final volume stood at 5 gallons.

Fermentation

In a word, vigorous. It began fermenting only hours after this whole process. By the night it was poppin off something fierce. It continued in this manner on Monday and Tuesday. It really settled and almost stopped by Wednesday. The airlock was still suspended up so I’m sure it was slowly doing something. By Thursday it had almost ceased and I was worried. I couldn’t take it any longer so I set up shop to rack it over to the carboy.

I made a 2 liter (~2 quart) yeast starter following the directions provided on BYO.com in their article entitled “Beauty and the Yeast”. It was a terribly simple process to make the starter. I used a sanitized 1 gallon carlo rossi jug as the vessel for my starter. I felt it was the easiest to sanitize and gave adequate headspace for the mini wort to foam up and such.

I prepared the starter 24 hours before I was ready to brew. By the next morning it had already flocculated a decent amount. I got right on preparing the wort.