Brew Day - Bag of Hair Morning Stout (name inspired by my coworkers, I know it's an appetizing name but this is far from a commercial operation here, it's an inside joke ok!)
At last I have brewed a stout (13D. Foreign Extra Stout)! I would have to say that stouts are certainly in my top 3 beer styles, it is tough to beat the smooth semi-sweet full body with roasted flavors and aromas, ahh so good! Sometimes I feel that a stout or two is a perfectly acceptable replacement for lunch. Honestly it is supposed to supply you with a reasonable amount of nutrition in addition to caloric energy that can be accessed quickly in the form of un-fermented dextrin sugars and longer term energy in the form of carbs. The infamous irish stout marketing slogan 'Guiness is good for you' actually has a pretty good amount of truth to it.
This one felt good, I felt like I was in command of the processes and had a really good feel for what I was doing. I am starting to get a good feel for working with my improvised equipment. I changed my mashing process, adding hot water to the grain inside of my mash/lauter tun converted cooler and letting it mash in there instead of adding the grain to hot water in the brew pot. The mash stayed very well insulated and didn't drop a single degree for 60 minutes, WAY BETTER! I got a mash efficiency of 77%, not bad for my second all-grain, huh? My first was 65%.. hah! Honestly I added more grain to the recipe expecting poor efficiency but now I just have a stronger stout. I also traded my 5-gal lauter tun cooler for a 10-gal, I hope Home Depot likes their new barley flavored water cooler! I did a side boil so I didn't have to dilute my wort, damn granite ware brew pot only holds about 4 gallons safely, certainly a gas burner and nice brew pot are first in line on my list of upgrades. I used the local hops for bittering and US fuggle for aroma/flavoring.
To control my temperatures when adding water to the mash I used these nifty equations(Infusion Equations). I keep coming back to John Palmer's 'How to Brew', it is a most excellent approach to brewing from a former engineer that has a deep understanding of the underlying concepts, chemistry, and physics of brewing. It is good to understand exactly what is going on, not just 'do this because it works', this will enable you to take creative freedom using your understanding. It will make you a much more powerful brewer. I think my next step will be developing a better understanding of pH and mineral content of water. This rocky mountain tap water is pretty close to distilled water from what I have gathered, very clean and relatively neutral in pH. I need to call up some local breweries and see how they approach it.
About half of this stout will get an addition of coffee bean Vodka at bottling. See my other post about making that!