American Stout

This past weekend I brewed up an Amerian Stout. I wanted to push the limits of my all grain system to see how big of a beer I could mash in my current 10 gallon cooler system. Well it looks like 27 lbs is about the max. That adds up to around a 6% abv all grain beer. I recently upgraded to a 14 gallon conical fermentor (will post more on that in another blog post) so I'm going to be focused more on doing 10-11 gallon batches. Wishing my mash tun was just a littler larger, guess it might be time to work on perfecting the lower ABV session beers. I made a few changes to my brew stand as well. Basically raised the two horizontal pieces so I can go directly from my mash tun into my boil kettle while it's on the burner (lifting 13-14 gallones of wort from the floor onto a burner didn't sound fun).

11 Gallon Batch
60 Minute Boil

Grain
20 lbs of American 2 Row
2 lbs of Roasted Barley
1.5 lbs of Pale Chocolate Malt
1.5 lbs of Crystal 40
2 lbs of Flaked Oats

Hops
2 oz of Simcoe for 60 Minutes
2 oz of Centennial for 30 Minutes
2 oz of Amarillo at KO

Yeast
Wyeast 1056 American Ale – 2 packs with large starter

Targets
Pre-Boil Gravity = 1.050
OG = 1.061
FG = 1.014
ABV = 6.1%
IBU = 57

Mash
8.5 gallons @ 152 for 60 minutes

Sparge
Fly sparge with 10 gallons of water

I plan to keg 5 gallons of this beer. I may even try out dry hopping it in the keg depending on how the hop aroma is. I like my stouts to have a bit of a citrusy hop aroma to them. The other 5 gallons I plan to transfer into a secondary fermentor no cocoa nibs. I may even try to incorporate some Dogfish Head Peanut Butter Vodka into a few of the chocolate stout bottles. We shall see...