Oatmeal Stout

With the time required to ferment, late October presents a good opportunity to get some beers ready for the holidays. On Sunday, October 23 Greg and I decided to embark upon an ambitious double-brew session, and had all of the ingredients for an Oatmeal Stout and a Nut Brown Ale.

First up was the Oatmeal Stout, and Northern Brewer once again provided us with the 9.0 lb. recipe as follows:

6.5 lb English Maris Otter
1.0 lb Flaked Oats
0.5 lb Simpsons Roasted Barley
0.5 lb Simpsons Chocolate
0.5 lb Simpsons Dark Crystal

For the Sacch' rest, we heated up 2.7 gal. of water to approximately 167 deg. and added the water and grain in the mash tun. The temperature was 154.5 deg. before we put the lid on. Target was 153 deg.

Mashout began with a 1 gallon addition of boiling water which brought the temperature up to 168.6. We mashed out for 10 minutes, and then recirculated the wort to create a nice grain bed for filtration during the sparge, video below:



We sparged with approximately 3 gal. of water and were able to yield a little under 6 gallons. To me this is the most exciting part of the entire brewing process, and so I typically left Greg to do all of the work while I recorded the action:



We brought the wort to a boil in the kettle and added 1 oz. Glacier hops for a 60 minute boil.

We then chilled the wort to pitching temperature, transferred into a brew bucket, and added Wyeast #1945 NB Neobritannia to get the fermentation started.

The Oatmeal Stout will take 2 weeks of primary fermentation and 2 weeks of secondary fermentation. After a few days sitting on CO2, the beer should be on tap around Thanksgiving.

Vital Statistics for the beer below:

Original gravity- 1.054
Brewhouse efficiency- 95% (Not sure this calculation is right, am positive we were not this good
Final gravity- 1.018
Alc. by Vol.- 4.73%

GwH

English Pale Ale

We decided to branch out and try a new recipe. We both liked Bass and decided to go with an English Pale Ale. The brewing took place on August 27, 2011. We used 9 pounds of Marris Otter and .5lbs of Crystal.


We brought the strike water to 164 degrees and mashed in at 151 degrees.


We had used teflon tape on the hot liquor tank to avoid future leaking. It worked perfectly. We added the four gallons of water at 175 degrees to the hot liquor tank.


We also brought the 1.5 gallons to a boil. When we added it to the mash we brought the temperature up to 168 degrees. We wanted 170 degrees, but this was the best we had done.

(this is us doing some spargin')

Our preboil gravity was 1.027 at 117.7 degrees, or 1.032 for gravity.

The original gravity was 1.040 at 97.7 degrees, or 1.045 for gravity.

The total wort came out to 7 gallons. The preboil gravity was 1.037.

The gravity at 100% efficiency was 1.051 gravity

75% efficiency was 1.038 gravity

Brew house efficiency 72.14%