Toasted Oat Coffee Stout

This recipe is simply a scaled version of recipe from The Mad Fermentationist, whose blog I have been following for a while. The title more or less explains what it should taste like. My version will be a tiny bit different in that I will be using some Irish-style oats, (which I discovered are not good for breakfast because they need to be cooked before eating, unlike Quaker Oats) toasted and boiled at home rather than the commercially toasted oats used in the original. Also I'll be using S-05 instead of S-04.

Steeping the black and chocolate grains.

Toasted Oat Coffee Stout
4# 8oz Crisp Maris Otter
1# 5oz Toasted Irish Oats
8oz Roasted Barley
8oz Briess Chocolate
4oz Crystal 40L
3oz Crystal 90L

.625 oz Chinook, 11.7%AA, 60mins

Mash at 154 for 60 mins.

Safale S-05

1.25oz Mocha Java crushed coffee beans, added after primary fermentation, about 24 hours

Expected OG / FG / IBUs: 1.055 / 1.014 / 38

11/1/12
Prepared oats: boiled the Irish Oats to gelatinze the starch, then when the porridge was fairly thick I transferred to a baking dish and put in the oven for about 2hours at 350F. The oats dried out a bit (I made sure to stir them so that no just the oats on the surface got dry) and took on a toasty, slightly-cookie like smell.

11/2/12
My mash  temps were 2F lower than desired. Meh!

Steeped the chocolate and black grains separately at 155F, added the resulting liquid to the 1st runnings and the rest of the dark grains to the sparge.

Very cloudy vorlauf.

The vorlauf was cloudier than usual due to all the gummy oat proteins and such. Fortunately no stuck sparge despite that I neglected to use any rice hulls.
 
Collected  2gal 1st runnings, with the addition of the dark-grain steeping water, and anoth 2.3 gal 2nd runnings for a total pre-boil volume of 4.3. Pretty much on-target.

Pre-boil OG was 4.4gal @ 1.040, for an efficiency of 68.5%. About average for my system, it seems.

I could tell that I was going to be a little over-target in terms of beer volume, so I added 4oz extra-light DME to up the gravity a little in compensation.

After chilling to 100F, covered the kettle and let sit in the garage, about 55F, to cool to pitching temps.

Transferred, aerated and pitched yeast. The wort was around 75F. After pitching, I placed the bucket in a tub of 60F water and used ice to maintain that temp.

11/4/12
Either my fermentation temp is too low or my plastic bucket has an air leak. There has not been any bubbling in the airlock, although by shining a flashlight into the sealed bucket I could see that a krausen has probably formed. So, I took out the fermentation lock and replaced it, making sure the little grommet around the hole in the lid was properly set. Then the airlock started bubbling slowly.

11/14/12, 9:50pm
I added 1.25oz coarsely crushed Mocha-Java coffee beans from Whole Foods. I bought them today and crushed them using a coffee grinder. They had been placed in the dispensing bin at Whole Foods on 11/8. I'm not really sure what the restocking date means in terms of freshness. I put the grounds in a sanitized hop bag with a small weight. Oddly it still seemed to be floating a little. The beer had that recently-fermented green smell, which I find a bit harsh. The plan is to bottle tomorrow evening around 9pm, so that the beer will have been sitting on the coffee for 24hours.

11/15/12, 9pm
Bottled with 2.25oz sugar, going for 2.2 volumes of CO2. I got 32 bottles of beer that has a moderate to strong coffee aroma. Final gravity was 1.016 - a little higher than expected but that's OK. I have pretty high hopes for this one. I'll try one bottle next week on Thanksgiving but let the rest sit for a total of two weeks before reviewing.