Amy’s Stout

Description:

My wife really liked Sam Adams Cream Stout when we had some last summer. I thought I’d try to make a beer with that nice creamy, roasty flavor, but lower gravity, for her graduation party last weekend.

Tasting notes (after 1 week in bottle/keg): Yum! Initial roasty-malty aroma with a hint of hop flower-spice. Fills your mouth, smooth, silky and medium-full body. Sweet but not too much, balanced with hops but towards the sweet side. Really right-on with what I was aiming for. Too bad I didn’t make this in time for the Nationals.

Amy loves it, the party guests liked it, once they got past the intimidating (to a beer neophyte) blackness.

If you really love the roasted coffee flavor of roasted barley, the beer could easily take more of it, or maybe 1/4lb chocolate malt to “sharpen up” the flavor a bit. But it’s darn good as it is, and tastes a lot “bigger” than you might expect from its OG.

Ingredients:

• 5.5 lb Hugh Baird Pale Ale malt
• 0.5 lb Carapils malt (Hugh Baird)
• 0.5 lb Hugh Baird 50L crystal
• 1.0 lb flaked oats (McCann’s Irish Quick Oats)
• 0.7 lb roasted barley
• 30g BC Kent Goldings flowers (5%) (60 min)
• 15g Kent Goldings (15 min)
• 15g Kent Goldings (5 min)
• Yeast Lab Irish Ale yeast

Procedure:

Step mash all grains together @61C for 30 min (3 gal strike), 65C for 30 min. (infuse 2qts boiling water). Sparged 5.8 gallons at 1.038.

Yield: 4.7 gallons @ 1.046 (I did add some top-up water during the boil).

Fermented 1 week in glass at 19-22C with a pint starter of YeastLab Irish Ale. FG 1.012.

Bottled with 1/3c corn sugar into 2 5l mini-kegs and 18 bottles.