Oatmeal Stout Review

I've been pretty busy for the last few weeks and will probably still be busy for the next week or so. That is the reason for the longish delay in reviewing the oatmeal stout. But here goes.

Appearance: Deep brown / black. Not completely opaque, but close. Small tan head that dissipates quickly, leaving only the surface of the beer and a few bubbles around the perimeter of the surface.

Aroma: I get a roast / chocolatey aroma, like a classic dry stout. A hint of dark fruit is somewhere in there. No hop aroma. I'm not really sure that the oats have contributed anything to the aroma, since I don't get anything that smells like oatmeal cookies.

Taste: Again, roast, coffee and chocolatey notes, but pretty subdued. No astringency. It's fairly dry, I would say almost as dry as an Irish Dry stout. I get some hop bitterness in the aftertaste. It's kind of earthy and blends well with the roast flavor.

Mouthfeel: Moderate carbonation, but a thickish mouthfeel provided by the oats. Roasty aftertaste.

Overall:  It tastes quite good, especially as it warms to serving temperature. As intended, it's tasty but overpowering, and it is low in ABV.  A good session beer. But the head retention is disappointing. Next time I will add some Carapils, wheat, or flaked barley to give it better foam.

Oatmeal Stout

Two weekends ago I brewed a low-ABV oatmeal stout, as I haven't made a session beer in quite some time, and my wife seems to prefer dark beers like porters and stouts. Also, this was the first time I used my new March pump in brewing, having recently installed a weldless fitting with a 1/2" ball valve onto my brew kettle and bought some high-temp silicone tubing. Fortunately I had tested everything the day before to ensure against leaks, etc..


Session Oatmeal Stout

About 3.2 gallons
 
4.5# US 2-Row
1# 2oz Instant Oatmeal, lightly toasted
8oz Victory Malt
6oz Chocolate Malt
4oz Crystal 80L
4oz Black Patent Malt

.3 oz Willamette, 5% AA, 60 min
.3 oz Nugget, 13% 60 min (substitution since I didn't have enough Willamette)

S-04 Yeast

Mash at 155F

Expected OG/FG/IBU/ABV: 1.048/ 1.012 / 27 / 4.7

Brewed 3/2/14

Brewed with several people who I had invited over, which was really fun but prevented me from taking gravity etc.. Also I didn't take any pictures of my new pumping set up, but I will on my next brew.

Hit my mash temps spot on. I pre-heated my MLT by putting about 1 gallon of boiling water inside for 15 minutes. I think I will do that every brew session in the future.

The only problem was that I didn't measure out enough sparge water, so I had to use about 1/2 gallon of hot (but not hot enough) water from the tap.

During the boil there were no leaks through the fitting. Yay!

At around 20 minutes before knockout I connected the pump, being sure to tighten the hose-clamps very tightly around the barbs so that no leaks would occur. Using hose-clamps is a pain, so at some point I'll upgrade to quick-disconnects for easier connecting of the tubing. I had also attached a ball valve to the output side of the pump so that I could if needed to control the amount of wort going through the recirculating arm.

The input to the March pump was from the kettle, and the output was to the recirculating arm of my wort chiller. After opening the ball valve on the kettle and the valve on the March pump, the boiling wort entered the pump. I then turned it on, and voila, I had boiling wort recirculating, forming a whirlpool. Awesome.

At knockout, I immediately turned on the sump-pump chilling water recirculating system, which worked amazingly well because the chilling water was just above freezing. In fact, the plastic bin was filled mostly with ice. (It has generally been really cold around here for the last two months, though it's clearly getting warmer.) The entire volume of wort went from 212F to about 55F in.... 10 to 15 minutes. Wow! That's is super fast compared to my previous chilling times, and due to the combination of ice-cold chilling water and the recirculating pump.

One thing that didn't work so well, however, was that the weight of the wort in the output tube was kind of pulling the chiller and the recirculating arm to the side, so that it wasn't standing up straight and the output of the recirculating arm was nearly above the surface of the wort. So, I kind of had to stand there and hold it straight. So now I need to find a way to hold the chiller upright or reduce the pull exerted by the output hose.

Once the wort was at 55F, I simply detached the output of the pump from the recirculating arm and pumped the wort into my sanitized carboy. Awesome. However, I rather foolishly picked up the kettle once most of the wort was in the fermenter and tipped the kettle over so that almost all of the trub wound up in the fermenter. Probably not optimal, but it probably won't hurt the beer significantly to have all that trub in there.

Pitched most of the packet of S-04, and placed the fermenter in an area of the house where it was about 64F.

So far it appears that the March pump is a great tool that can significantly ease the brew day by making it less time-consuming. Obviously I'll need to use it a bit more to really get a sense of its strengths and weaknesses. However, one upgrade that will clearly be useful if not at some point necessary is a set of quick-disconnects. 

3/5/14
A smallish krausen was present.

3/9/14
The krausen is gone, and does not appear to have ever been big or super vigorous. Probably normal for a low-gravity beer. 

3/16/14
Bottled, going for 2.2 volumes of CO2. The gravity reading was 1.024 or so. That's 10 points higher than expected, but I don't see why that should be the case. But the yeast had had 2 weeks to do its thing in the right temp range. Not sure what's happening. I just hope I don't get bottle bombs! Maybe a problem with the hydrometer?

Coffee Oatmal Stout Tasting

My first brew with coffee turned out pretty well, I am happy to say. I am relieved because the oats I used were old and Irish style, instead of the standard quick oats that usually should be used in an oatmeal stout.

Appearance: Very dark, opaque brown or black color with a medium sized tan head on top. Carbonation bubbles stick to the side of the glass.

Aroma: A mix of coffee, toasted notes and chocolate notes. Complex, but I think the coffee is most prominent. I don't think I get any hop aroma.

Taste: Like the smell - a mix of toasty and chocolate, combined with a subtle roastiness and coffee taste. There's a definite sweetness from the crystal malt, and a nutty or bready flavor from the Maris Otter. No one taste predominates, which suprises me a little because when I bottled the beer it had a very strong coffee odor and the sample tasted like coffee. It has mellowed out quite a bit since then. I get a hint of hop bitterness in the aftertaste, but overall the malty / coffee flavor is dominant.

Mouthfeel: Pretty thick and creamy, but smooth. Moderate carbonation. There's a lingering coffee aftertaste, maybe combining with a bit of hoppiness.

Overall: A complex mix of roasty, coffee, chocolate and sweetness. Thick mouthfeel from the oats. Pretty smooth and not overpowering.

It would be great to have a side-by-side comparison between my version and the original, ut I'm not really interested in duplicating other beers so much as I am in getting a good end product. In this case I do think the beer is pretty good.

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.