New brew – “Krispy Stout”

I’ve been busy and have brewed up another beer – Krispy Stout this time, and it’s in the fermenter bubbling away as we speak.

You can click on the image below to see the recipe – ignore the bitterness figure though – it seems not to be working correctly!  I used both pale chololate malt and roasted barley to get the flavours and colour of a stout – using a bit of spare crystal malt just to add to the layers of flavour.

My Krispy Stout recipe

I used a whyest liquid yeast this time – a ‘proper’ Irish ale yeast to try and get the beer as close to type as possible.  Unusually for me I’ve kept to ‘normal’ beer strength, rather than try and hit the more old school 8-9%’s of some of my IPA style beers.  I also added a couple of large spoons of black treacle, just to add a touch of ‘toffee’ to the mix – the wort pre yeast tasted really nice; big flavours of coffee, chocolate and malt.

I made sure the liquid yeast would do the job by adding it to a wort starter 3 days before I needed it – by boiling up 2 litres of water with 200g of dried pale malt extract for 10 mins, then letting it cool in a steralised glass jar, and adding the liquid yeast.  Cover with a foil ‘lid’, and leave in a warm n dark place.  3 days later the yeast is going mad, like it’s fermenting a beer (which it is in reality, just a small batch).  Then pour that 2 litres of starter into the cooled wort in the fermentor, and stand back

Update 11th October 2009
Well I’ve barrelled the Stout, as I decided because Stout doesn’t need to be to fizzy, or cold, that a barrel would be the better option for it (pressure barrels cannot actually handle the pressure needed for highly carbonated drinks).  So I mixed up about 120 grams of dry light malt extract, and about 30 grams of brewing sugar, with about 2/3rds of a pint of boiling water.  That was added to the freshly steralised barrel, and then the stout siphoned out carefully into it, mixing with the sugars.

One little tip – I put the lid on the barrel (not screwed on!) then use my soda stream CO2 (with brass adaptor) in the lid inlet to fire some CO2 as a blanket over the beer, before screwing the lid on properly.  That way I know I’ve pushed some of the oyxgen out, putting a carbon dioxide ‘cap’ onto the beer to help protect it from oxydising (not good at this point).  Then I’ve used the heat belt (you plug it into the mains, and it warms up to keep the ale warm) to keep the temp up for the first week (not leaving it on all that time, as I’d end up with hot soup) – just now and then when it felt a little cool.  So hopefully the yeast which is left in the beer will eat up the sugars and the gas will stay in the beer to carbonate it.  After a day I used the soda stream gas again in anger, to try and raise the pressure up in the barrel so to help keep the naturally fermented CO2 in the beer.

I did try the beer during the transfer (pop a bit in a clean glass) – it was very flat (more so than I’ve noticed before..) but did taste spot on – probably the best or most authentic flavour I’ve managed so far.  Let’s hope the barrel fermentation works well and I’ve not just ended up with sweet flat stout!  I’ll give it another two weeks before I tap a trial glass…