Oatmeal Stout

9th all grain batch in the books, Oatmeal Stout. Elise wrote the recipe, it has 8 different kinds of malts including 2 lbs of oats and it should clock in at ~6.5% when all is said and done. It might end up being a little less than that alcohol wise because we mashed at 157 F. The higher mash temperature with yield a beer with more body, but also less fermentatability. In the bowl below the oats is 2 grams of chalk, and 3 grams of baking soda. When you are making really dark beers with a lot of roasted malts, the pH of the beer can become too low and have detrimental effects. Hard water contains high amounts of carbonates which allow darker beers to be brewed by buffering the acidity contributed by the highly kilned dark malts. Soft water on the other hand, is most suited to making beers like pilsner and other lighter colored beers. Our water in Aurora is neither hard nor soft, and therefor is best suited for dark amber to brown colored beers. Baking soda is NaHCO3 and chalk is CaCO3, and by adding small amounts of each to the mash, we increased the "hardness" of the water by adding carbonates and hopefully resulting in a proper mash pH. This is our first attempt at water additions, and in the future I'm sure they will be a lot better. We decided to brew this beer about 14 hours before hand, so we didn't have a lot of time to do enough research on the mineral additions. Hopefully it turns out OK.

Most stouts are supposed to be in the color range of 20-40 SRM. Elise, and myself, like to make our beers stronger and darker than normal. With our brewing software, the estimated SRM based on the recipe was 57 SRM. You can click here to get an idea of what SRM numbers correspond to which color.

We had a busy weekend beer wise. Saturday we bottled our IPA, 8% and then on Sunday we brewed the Oatmeal Stout and bottled the Belgian IPA, also 8%. Both IPA's were the same batch, but were fermented with 2 separate yeast strains. The first taste of the Belgian was very very good, but not as 'funky' as I thought it would be. Usually Belgian yeasts can impart a yeasty, fruity, 'funkyness' to the beer, but I think becuase we fermented the beer at 68 F instead at ~76 F, the yeast imparted a much cleaner overall profile to the beer. I'm sure we will do this again in the future, and hopefully we can warm the fermentation up a bit to get some more yeast characteristics in the beer.