Tag Archives: specialty beer

Imperial Vanilla Milk Stout Recipe

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Big stouts and vanilla is a natural pair. Add a touch of creamy sweetness, and you’ve got a winner. This recipe has a luscious mouth feel from the flaked barley and crystal malts, smooth roast flavors of coffee and chocolate, subtle dark fruit notes, and a slight sweetness from the lactose. This is a slightly sweet beer, but not nearly as sweet as many commercial sweet stouts.

Specifications

Volume: 5.57 Gallons
Original Gravity: 1.077
Terminal Gravity: 1.028
Color: 34.63 SRM
Alcohol: 6.52%
Bitterness: 39.2
Efficiency: 64% (tweak recipe to match efficiency of your brew house)
Boil Length: 60 Minutes

Ingredients

12 lb (63.6%) Maris Otter; Crisp
3 lb (15.9%) Barley Flaked
6 oz (2.0%) Crystal 60; Crisp
8 oz (2.6%) Crystal 120; Crisp
8 oz (2.6%) Special B – Caramel malt; Dingemans
12 oz (4.0%) Chocolate Malt; Crisp
12 oz (4.0%) Pale Chocolate Malt; Crisp
8 oz (2.6%) Roasted Barley; Crisp
.75 oz (42.9%) Magnum (12.5%) – added during boil, boiled 60 m
1 ea Whirlfloc Tablets (Irish moss) – added during boil, boiled 15 m
8 oz (2.6%) Lactose
.75 tsp Wyeast Nutrient – added during boil, boiled 10 m
1 oz (57.1%) Cascade Leaf (5.7%) – added during boil, boiled 10 m
1 ea WYeast 1968 London ESB Ale – 2400ml 1.040 starter on stir plate
3 ea Madagascar Vanilla Beans – split and soaked in 6oz high quality bourbon – added dry to secondary fermenter

Water

Carbon-filtered Seattle water which is very soft.  All salts added to grist before mashing in.
2 g Epsom Salts (Magnesium Sulfate)
2.0 g Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate)
4.0 g Calcium Chloride (Calcium Chloride)
4.0 g Baking Soda ()

Mash

60 Minute Saccharification Rest at 152° F
10 Minute Mashout Rest at 170° F (I do a second hot water infusion to mashout)
Sparge at 170° F and collect sufficient runnings to hit pre-boil volumes.

Fermentation

  1. Chill wort to 64° F and pitch yeast slurry.
  2. Set temp controller to 66° F and allow to rise to this temp.
  3. Ferment at 66-68° F until beer is 2-6 points from terminal gravity then raise temp to 72° F. Hold at 72° F for 2 days.
  4. Chill fermenter to 34° F. Rack beer off yeast into clean container with bourbon soaked vanilla beans (include the bourbon as well).
  5. Age 1 month on vanilla beans before packaging.

Keys to Brewing

  1. Controlling fermentation temperatures and pitching a clean healthy yeast slurry is important in preventing hot alcohols in this beer that would distract from its rich, smooth qualities.
  2. Use fresh high-quality vanilla beans. If they look dried out, they are probably old and shouldn’t be used. Beans should be sticky, almost tacky to the touch. I’d recommend sourcing these online from specific vanilla retailers who move a lot of beans (as opposed to the ones that may languish for months in the homebrew shop).

Awards

The beer brewed from this recipe has won several awards as a BJCP Category 21a Spice / Herb / Vegetable Beer:

  • 2012 NHC First Round – 1st Place
  • 2012 Novembeerfest – 2nd Place

Related Posts:

  1. Northern English Brown Recipe
  2. Single Tap IPA Recipe
  3. Belgian Saison Recipe
  4. Vienna Lager Recipe
  5. Five – Blended Strong Ale

Five – Blended Strong Ale

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Blending Session

Blending Session

Blending is common part of nearly every wine maker’s tool box. It allows them to not only create a consistent product, but also take a mental picture of the wine they would like to make and then assemble individual components to achieve their vision. Outside of one of my favorite breweries (Firestone Walker), very few craft brewers are doing this. This is part of our common brewing heritage (various British ales, Gueuze, etc.) and something I am very interested in as a means to bring another level of complexity to a beer.

Category 23 of the BJCP style guideline (Specialty Beer) is wide open. It offers unlimited possibilities for stretching your creative arms. It occurred to me that a blended beer would be an interesting take for this category.

My Process

  1. I started with the concept of creating a blended desert style beer that is not unlike a fine Port or Sherry. The blended final product would be sweet, but not cloyingly so.  From there I looked at what beers I had on hand and pulled samples from the following beers:
    – 2 year old Belgian Dark Strong
    – 6 month old German Dopplebock
    – 1 year old Scottish Wee Heavy
    – 2 year old oak aged English Barley Wine
    – 2 year old oak aged Russian Imperial Stout
  2. With these samples on hand, each was tasted and then noted for their unique characteristics that could lend an interesting note to the final beer. For example, the Belgian Dark Strong was extremely dry and alcoholic. It featured a unique port like quality as well.  It was decided that it could provide a nice balancing dryness to the sweetness of the other beers as well as introduce a nice dark fruit component that could help me achieve a port like quality. The goal was to highlight the strong features of each beer and then use a ratio of each to create a holistic final blend.
  3. With a mental picture of each beer in my head, I came up with a starting ratio to begin with. Using a turkey baster and graduated 100ml cylinder I continually refined the blend until I came up with what seemed to be the superior blend.
  4. With the final blend decided, I used CO2 and a jumper cable to push a portion of each beer into a clean and purged keg. I used a scale to determine how much beer was pushed into the blending keg and keep the ratio of the final blend to the ratio I had determined by taste.
  5. With the blend kegged I let the beer meld and carbonated it to approximately 2.3 volumes of CO2.

Upon tasting the final product, I came up with the following description to be used as the description for my competition entries:

Five strong homebrews of different country origins blended to produce a rich beer with port-like qualities and complexity. A sipper that is designed as an after-dinner dessert beer.

The description worked. The beer placed 1st in the first round of the 2012 National Homebrew Competition in Category 23.