Re-brewday: Accidental Imperial Stout

Of the beers I've brewed so far, Bron's favourite is the Accidental Imperial Stout. I brewed it about 11 1/2 months ago and we're down to about 8 bottles. She's been wanting me to brew it again so that the supply is maintained. Also, it's Winter and there's no better time to be drinking a Stout than in the depths of a Tasmanian Winter.

Really imperial

I've made a few changes that should make it ready to drink sooner and better:

Using the Mr Malty calculator, I've realised that I pitched only about 1/3 of the yeast I should have last time. This year, I've got plenty of yeast ready to go. This should help the fermentation to be quicker and cleaner which should mean that the beer is ready to drink much sooner than the first time when it was more than 6 months before it became a pleasant drink.

ALL the yeast

Temperature control is now in my grasp. Last year it fermented a bit cool which didn't do the poor, under-pitched yeast any favours. This year, sitting at around 20'C, it should be much happier.

I added some more hops and changed the variety from East Kent Golding to Northern Brewer. The main reason was just to give it better balance. The first version is thick and syrupy and doesn't have much bitterness. I'd like the hops to cut through that a bit with this version.

Yeast gone wild!

The recipe is big and ugly, with almost 3/4 of a kilo of roasted barley and chocolate malt together and 640g of crystal malts. On top of that there's 5kg of light dried malt extract. It is the blackness. There's also a bunch of Northern Brewer hops. I've chucked in about 22g of S-04 yeast and it's gone bezerk.

Brewday: Irish Red Ale

I finally managed to brew (almost) unassisted. I'm on the way back from this sickness! It was a spur of the moment thing so instead of brewing one of the 10 or so beers that are on my list of beers to brew, I brewed an Irish Red Ale since I had the ingredients for it. I'm still brewing on the stovetop until I can get a wort chiller sorted out so it was just a 11.5l batch.

Beyond brewing beers that I enjoy, one of my aims in brewing is to produce beers that Bron likes to drink. Irish Red Ale was probably the first craft beer that Bron really loved. We had the Redoak version back in 2007 and it remains the gold standard for us. If I can produce something that doesn't embarrass itself next to that I'll be stoked.

Not my photo but that's the colour I'm going for

For the recipe I used 2.1kg of maris otter as the base malt and 100g of crystal 120ebc to contribute some colour and a bit of cara flavour. 30g of roasted barley gave the brew that black-red colour I was after. At the last moment I decided to go with 150g flaked barley as well for a bit of extra creaminess and body. I chucked in some EKG and fuggles hops (just using up leftovers) to ~20 IBUs. I used S-04 yeast.

The brew went well although the stove struggled to get the wort to the boil. It was so much fun to get back into it after over 4 months of just reading about brewing. The aim was for an OG of 1.047 at 75% efficiency into the fermenter, I hit 1.048.

So now it's fermenting away and I can't wait to see how it turns out.