Immigrant Bastard Experimental…beer

Ingredients

• Second runnings from Irish Imperial
• 1lb 2-Row
• 1lb 7oz Munich
• 1lb Light Malt Extract (Dry)

Notes

• Mashed in at 132F for 30min.  Previously added about 1qt of original irish imperial mash
• Conversion at 153F for 25min

Hops

• 60min 1oz Citra
• 45min 1oz Citra
• 30min .5oz Perle
• 15min .5oz  Tettnang

Imperial Irish Stout 2 – The Wreckening

Ingredients

• 9lb 2-Row
• 1lb 14oz Roasted Barley
• 1/2lb Black Patent
• 1/2lb Briess Chocolate
• 5oz Crystal 40L (4.6)
• 6lb Light Malt Extract (Dry)
• 2oz Centennial
• 1oz Cascade
• 1oz US Kent Golding
• 6oz Jameson
• 4tablets Beano

Notes

• Mashed in at 122F for 30min (temp was 127F at 15min and also at 30min)
• Conversion around 153F for 25 min
• So much grain.  Deciding to do a big beer and a little beer.  Sparging the grains for a second batch is proving to be an amusing challenge.
• 60min – 2oz Centennial
• 45min – 1oz Cascade
• 30min – 1oz US Kent Golding
• 15min – 1tsp Irish Moss

OG: 1.062

FG: 1.036

Imperial Irish Stout

In my last post about this beer, I was pretty stoked about it.

I am seriously stoked about this beer. It’s goddamn fantastic. I don’t have the faintest idea how the planets aligned to make that happen, but I don’t even want to give any of it away it’s so good.

Next month, though, I’m going to take the few remaining bottles I have to the Chicago Beer Society‘s monthly meeting to get some opinions from people who know their beer. I gave some to a couple of the bartenders at Hopleaf and they really seemed to like it.

I’m definitely going to be doing this recipe again, hopefully with the same success. Even though it was pretty expensive to make, it’s been worth every penny.

Success!?

So, I just bottled the Imperial Irish Stout and it didn’t taste contaminated.

At least, the taste of contamination didn’t overpower the alcohol content.

Which, by the way, damn.

You know that face you make when you’re sober and do a shot? And that big exhale you do to try to get some fresh air?

You do that every single time you sip this beer. It’s THAT alcoholic.

I gotta say. I don’t know if the Beano is the cause of this, but if it is, I’m going to abuse the crap out of this new information.

Besides being really, really high in alcohol content, it’s pretty good – way dry, which I’ve read is an effect of using Beano, and has kind of a burnt caramel / molasses flavor. It’s not bitter at all, and not malty. It seems really well balanced once you get past the alcohol. It’s not really heavy, either, despite the fact that you can’t see through it at all. At all. Light does not escape this beer.

Seriously – I’m kinda dizzy and all I’ve had is the skinny little testing tube! OK, I haven’t had anything to eat yet (priorities!).

I’m christening this one “Black Hole Sun”.

Imperial Irish Stout

• 2lb Roasted Barley
• 1/2lb Black Patent Malt
• 1/2lb Chocolate Malt
• 1/4lb Crystal 40L Malt
• 9lb 2-Row
• 6lb Light Malt Extract
• 2oz Centennial Hops (11.5% AA)
• 1oz Cascade Hops (5.6% AA)
• 60z Bushmill’s 10 year
• 4 Beano caplets

This one was a total CF. First attempt in my new kitchen and lots of problems throughout the day lead me to believe that there’s a good chance this one got contaminated.

I basically followed the recipe from my previous post, but added some errors.

First of all, that is A LOT of grain. A LOT. You can’t (or shouldn’t) make this with anything short of a 5gal boiling pot and you need 6-8 grain bags (big ones) for all that grain. I had to make it in two pots and change the grain 3 times to get it all in there. So that was big problem #1.

No.

That was big problem #2.

Big problem number one was staying out ’til 4:00 in the morning and getting totally wrecked. Note: Sweating alcohol while you’re trying to remember how to brew when you’re not physically or mentally on the ball leads to a fair amount of sloppiness.

So after I made wort from all that grain, I didn’t have any grain bags left for the hops. So I just put the hops in the pot loose. That works, technically, but it makes it WAY harder to get the beer into the carboy without contaminating it, ’cause you have to get all the hops back out somehow. So I had to pour the beer through a strainer, through a funnel, and into the carboy, reaching into the strainer to pull hops out every once in a while so that it didn’t just clog up. So that gave me several more opportunities to contaminate the beer, on top of making me splash the crap out of it and getting beer EVERYWHERE.

This is a really dark one, too, with a lot of sugars in it. So when I say I spilled it everywhere, I mean it looked like a bottle of thick soy sauce exploded in my kitchen.

Anyway, after lots of potential screw-ups, contamination, etc. I finally got all this black oil into the carboy and it’s fermenting in the back room now. I also threw some Beano caps into the fermenter to see what the effect of that is. Supposedly the enzymes that are in Beano break down complex sugars (starches) into fermentable sugars, reducing the amount of carbs in the beer and making it more alcoholic. Both desirable. We’ll see how that goes.

Actually, not really. Since I don’t know how this was supposed to turn out, and didn’t take an OG reading when I put it into the carboy, I don’t know how I’ll even tell how much alcohol is in there. I’m hoping 8-10%. And I’m hoping that this isn’t contaminated and tastes like it looks. This is some seriously dark beer.