stout

I've brewed again. It's actually a bit scary how easy it was to pick up right where I left off. I've had the recipe for this batch sitting curled up in its cozy spreadsheet for months now. Some of it didn't seem quite right, but I decided to trust my judgement from back then, as I was way more absorbed in beer design and obviously had some sort of vision I was pursuing.

What I brewed should end up being a strong (Imperial-ish?) stout, no messin around, just straight up unapologetic blackness and dryness.

For about the fourth time in a row, the guy at the brewstore looked at me funny while I was ordering up my grains. I had my spreadsheet with me, though, and I explained in vague terms how I came up with the numbers I had. He ran it through the brewing software they use there and came up with almost exactly the same result I was predicting. This was a relief, as I have given that spreadsheet out as a functional planning tool to others.

Since the lat time I brewed, we've installed a new oven and a new cooktop in our kitchen. You'd think this would have necessitated some adjustment, but aside from having to get used to everything working faster and better, no adjustment necessary. Literally. I brought my water to 170 degrees in record time using the extra-large "turbo" burner on the new cooktop, dumped in 5 1/3 lbs of pale malt, plus smaller amounts of roasted barley and black malt, took it off the heat, stuck my thermometer probe into the mash, slid it all into the oven on its dehydrate mode set to 160 degrees, and worked on getting other stuff set up. No adjustments, no messing around, just set the temp and kick back. Wow.

I have to say, it would be really easy to do a stepped mash in this oven. I think I'm going to have to give it a whirl next time. I still have absolutely no desire to do full grain. Minimashing is just too cheap, too easy, and gives too consistently good results to consider making a bigger, stickier, hotter mess in my small kitchen, especially when I'm getting mash efficiencies like 77% doing what I'm doing now.

I added a small trick to the sparging process, and slid a strainer into the bottom of the grain bag before I sparged it. This kept the bag and the mash from clogging up the entrance to the outlet. I clipped the edge of the bag to the side of the brew bucket at the top so I could pour the mash in without assistance. Two clips would have been even better, but I could only find one, so I used some rubber bands to help keep things in place. Worked great, even if it didn't look too pretty.

From there, I added short of 4 lbs of powdered extract and went into a 60-minute boil, with an ounce of Chinooks from last year's harvest right at the start, followed by an ounce of Willamettes each at 30 and 15 minutes.

It came out at about 74 GU, a little stronger than I expected, but with attenuation from the WLP007 only registering in the high 70s, it will still be on the -ish side of Imperial, maybe 6% or so. That's fine by me, as I was wanting something easy-drinking for the summer.