I measured the Specific Gravity today on the Russian Imperial Stout and measured 1.026. It is still bubbling, so it looks like the fermentation has gone well. I was worried that I couldn’t get this monster beer to ferment, but it has gone well. The hydro sample is definitely bitter, but has a real nice taste to it—and quite the kick.
Looking forward to it!
If that turns out to be the case, a pot d’depart or going-away party is certainly in store! Since I’ve been in Paris brewing beer, Tom has been a big supporter and is always eager to try my latest brew. As Tom and I talked about this, he suggested that maybe I should make a “theme beer” or just a special beer to be consumed at this going-away party. “Excellent idea!” I said. I had just the beer in mind.
I’ve been looking at some higher alcohol barley wines and also stouts as both styles I have yet to try. Over at Home Brew Talk, there is a recipe posted by BrewPastor called “Dark Night of the Soul Russian Imperial Stout.” The name really caught my attention and the challenge of brewing such a wicked brew got me interested.
Here are the specs posted online for a 10-gallon batch:
Recipe Type: All Grain
Yeast: Wyeast 1272
Yeast Starter: HUGE
Batch Size (Gallons): 10
Original Gravity: 1.1324
Final Gravity: 1.020
IBU: 178
Boiling Time (Minutes): 90
Color: void of light
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 1 week
Additional Fermentation: eternity
Secondary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 4 weeks
Dark Night of the Soul
A ProMash Recipe Report
Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 10.00 Wort Size (Gal): 10.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 48.00
Anticipated OG: 1.13245 Plato: 30.668
Anticipated SRM: 53.3
Anticipated IBU: 178.8
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 %
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes
Grain/Extract/Sugar
% Amount Name Origin Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
83.3 40.00 lbs. Pale Malt(2-row) Great Britain 1.03800 3
5.2 2.50 lbs. Roasted Rye France 1.03000 95
4.2 2.00 lbs. Chocolate Malt Belgium 1.03000 500
4.2 2.00 lbs. Crystal 150L Great Britain 1.03300 150
3.1 1.50 lbs. Special B Malt Belgian 1.03000 120
Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.
Hops
Amount Name Form Alpha IBU Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
10.00 oz. Columbus Pellet 15.00 178.8 60 min.
Notice that HUGE Original Gravity (OG) and low Finish Gravity (FG). Just to sum things up, this is a BLACK BLACK BLACK beer, really bitter, and really high in alcohol. Calculating out the numbers gives an expected ABV of 14.8%. That is really strong and contains more alcohol that most wines.
So, the recipe looks good, the reports on the forum seem to point that this is a unique, interesting brew, so I think it could be an interesting challenge and provide a nice going-away beer for Tom’s party.
First order of business is cutting down the recipe. I wish I had the equipment to brew 10-gallons of beer using just grain, but that is just not the case in my Paris apartment. If you read the posts below, I’m not in possession of a barley mill and I’ve adopted the BIAB (Brew in a Bag) technique to allow me to do all-grain beer on the stovetop. Since this is such a “serious” and strong brew, I didn’t want to make too much either as 1) It is really strong and you can’t drink too much at once 2) It is tricky to brew and I wasn’t sure how it would turn out.
Type: All Grain
Date: 3/28/2010
Batch Size: 3.00 gal
Boil Size: 3.61 gal
Boil Time: 90 min
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00
Ingredients
% or IBU Amount Item 86.54 % 13.50 lb Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (1.5 SRM) Grain
4.81 %
0.75 lb Chocolate Rye Malt (250.0 SRM) Grain
3.21 % 0.50 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (120.0 SRM) Grain
3.21 % 0.50 lb Chocolate Malt (450.0 SRM) Grain
2.24 % 0.35 lb Special B Malt (200.0 SRM) Grain
167.1 IBU 3.25 oz Magnum [15.10 %] (60 min) Hops
1 Pkg American Ale II (Wyeast Labs #1272)Yeast-Ale (2.5 liter starter made with XL pack)
Beer Profile
Est Original Gravity: 1.130 SG
Measured Original Gravity: 1.116 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.031 SG
Measured Final Gravity: 1.026 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 13.11 %
Actual Alcohol by Vol: 11.86 %
Bitterness: 167.1 IBU
Calories: 555 cal/pint
Est Color: 54.1 SRM
So, I basically started with about 15-lbs of grain—which would make a pretty high ABV 6-gallon batch of beer and used half the water to make a 3-gallon finished batch. I had to adjust the original recipe just a little bit as I wasn’t able to buy all the exact grains here in France. It seems to have matched up pretty well with the original recipe.
I started the morning with toasting the rye as I couldn’t find the Roasted Rye specified in the recipe. I baked it for about 30-minutes at 180°C, until it looked about the same darkness as Crystal 120. I’m not sure if it was enough or not, but I didn’t want to burn it. The aroma through the apartment was wonderful!! I would honestly buy a scented candle if they made one with this aroma!
Next, everything was ground up in the new Barley Crusher. It only took about 10-minutes of hand cranking to make my way through the 15-lbs of grain.
Here is all the grain sitting in my 25-liter poly bucket ready for the mash. That’s a lot of grain for 3-gallons of beer. I mashed at 150°F to keep the fermentables up and help ensure that I could come close to this beer finishing out.
I did not sparge the grains, just took the first runnings from the BIAB process. Here is an interesting set of shots from the wort in the boil kettle and the heat coming on. I’m using a gas range and as the flames begin to heat the wort, they stir the trub up on the bottom.
As you can see from the first shot, this beer is BLACK. I can’t wait to try it! Here is the hop addition---Lupulin goodness!
After cooling the wort, I measured the OG at 1.116. It is lower than the recipe called for, no doubt from a little lower efficiency from the BIAB without a sparge. But, the ABV shown above in my recipe is based on this OG of 1.116 and a measured FG (not quite the end) at 1.026.
I am giddy with excitement! Because of this:
Finally, I can grind up all of the grain that I’ve been stockpiling. The folks at BC Products were nice enough to send me one from all 
I have to tell you though, I really hated “wasting” this 1/2 pound of malt! : ) Looking forward to brewing some nice beers this weekend. After I bottle this next batch, I’ll have 3-fermenters open and ready for beer.
So tonight, I uploaded some old posts from a “blog” I started when I first arrived in Paris. They are old, from 2008 and reflect some of my first thoughts and experiences, and mistakes while here in Paris. I never really kept up with the regular updates of all the things I found strange and all the things I did wrong. I kind of wished I did, but it is about as tough as keeping this blog up to date.
I can’t tell you how much I hate to wash beer bottles. 
So, my first all-grain batch is a wrap. I let it ferment for about a week and checked the gravity. It was down to 1.012 which was just a little higher than I wanted. I decided to let it go another week and then some. I bottle it today and got about 19-liters of finished beer at 1.010 FG. It tastes quite good, bitter, but not overwhelming. It has a nice nutty taste and I’m really curious to see how it will carbonate up and taste at refrigerated temps.
At some point, I really want to start harvesting yeast. I pitched a 1.5 liter starter on this beer and it fermented out quite well. It really is amazing that you start with a single vial of yeast and what you end up with at the end. The flocculation on this yeast was really great and I was able to rack-off almost all of the beer without sucking up any yeast. Here is what was left.
I recovered almost 4-cups of yeast from the fermenter that I really hated to pour down the drain. But, I just don’t have a good way to store it right now. Hopefully later, I can get a canning setup and start to sterilize some jars and same some yeast from beer to beer to start and lower my costs a bit. Next report: How it tastes!
So, I’ve been away from the blog for a while. I’ll try to keep things current a little better this year on what is going on.
As discussed in one of my previous blogs, one of the regulars on HomebrewTalk (HBT) posted a method for all-grain brewing on the stovetop. Typically, people that tackle all-grain brewing, have a little more space than an apartment including a large, outdoor propane cooker, a couple large pots for boiling water and a cooler to use as a mash tun. Not having all this space, outdoor cookers and coolers, I tried the simpler approach detailed above.
When I was in the US over Christmas, I brought back lot’s of ingredients and a few supplies to make beer. To all those that ask, YES, I can buy the stuff over here, but it is not as easy and honestly, the availability of items here in Europe (at least what I’ve found) is not as great as what is available in the USA. Home brewing is just not as popular here.
So, I picked a good English mild, Brown ale-type recipe from the HBT archives. Since I was not able to get all my pale malt back from the US, I was a little short on the recipe…hence the “almost” in the title of the blog. I did end up using about 1/2 pound of dry malt extract to get my gravity where I wanted it.
So, I loaded all my information into my Beersmith software and adjusted quantities a bit to keep the color, OG, IBUs and other parameters correct for the style.
The recipe started as “Mild Mannered Ale” by Orfy on HBT and I tweaked it a bit. Thanks Orfy, I don’t know you, but the recipe looks good. Here is the final recipe I used:
I actually started this beer on Sunday with a yeast starter. Since I am forced to ship my liquid yeasts in from the US and who knows how well they have been stored, I have started doing starters for all my batches if nothing else but to verify the health of the yeast on 2-liters of beer without risking 5-gallons of wort.
I use a small 3-liter water bottle that I got here in Paris to do my starters. This starter was started Sunday, so it is about 3-days old in this picture. You can tell it is “done” because the beer has cleared and all the yeast is settled to the bottom waiting on more food.
Before pitching this yeast starter, I decanted about 1/2 of the liquid, shook vigorously and then pitched the rest into my fermenter.
To get started, I used Beersmith to calculate my water temps and volumes of water. I had just 6.5-lbs of grain, so I chose 10-quarts of mash water, giving me 1.53 qt/lb of water-to-grain ratio and heated that up to 166°F.
I held the grains at temperature for 60-minutes. I mostly kept the cover on, but would open it about every 10-minutes to check my temperature. A few times I added some heat with the burner and also added some ice cubes to keep my temperatures where I wanted them. I saw as high as 166°F on my floating thermometer. Time will tell if I killed the enzymes.
I moved my mash tun to the back burner and started heating up my sparge water. The plan was to do a large “batch sparge” where I remove all the grains from the mash tun and simply dunk them in the sparge water to remove the final sugars.
Going on the advice of the HBT article, I chose 18-quarts of sparge water as the more I used, the higher my efficiency should be. While I was doing the process, I thought I had really messed up with the quantity of water I had to boil, but it really turned out okay. After mashing for 1-hour, my sparge water was up to temperature and it was time to commence with the process.
I drained the grains as best I could and then sent them to the sparge water for a 10-minute rinse. I was shooting for a sparge of 170°F, so I heated my water to about 180°F. 
At the “official” beginning of the boil, I added 25-grams (or about 0.87 ounces) of Fuggles that I picked up in London last fall. My last experience making beer with an Octane IPA (a Midwest recipe), I just threw all the hop pellets into the boil. With my small funnel and strainer setup (see below), that caused me a LOT of trouble trying to get all the beer into the fermenter. 
With 15-minutes left in the boil, I added the Irish moss and the last batch of Fuggles. Also, since I was a little short on grain and I had opened a bag of dry malt extract, I figured I would just use it up. So as not to make the beer darker than I wanted, I just added it at 15-minute before the end for “late extract addition.” I finished out the boil, threw on my sanitized lid and moved the entire container to the bathtub. Since I’m in an apartment, I’m trying not to accumulate too much equipment, so I don’t have a heat exchanger for cooling my wort. I find that 1-hour in a cold water bath tub (filled as high as it will go) does the job. It uses a lot of water, but it works and that is all I have right now.
I took one sample to check my gravity and it looked good. My target according to Beersmith was 1.038, which is at the high end of the style guidelines for a Mild, but that’s okay. I ended up with 1.040 which is pretty close for my first all-grain beer. 
As I described above, I made a 1.5 liter starter on Sunday with Whitelabs WLP005. It has completely fermented out the limited sugars I gave it and had settled out nicely in my water jug. I decanted off about 1/2 of the liquid and then put the lid on the jug. I shook it up vigorously and then pitched everything into the fermenter. 
