I recently splurged and picked up a six pack of Bell's Cherry Stout, which is not cheap, but well worth the $14 for the sixer. This beer is incredible. A nice cherry presence on top of a chocolatey-roasty stout. I decided to brew a version of my own. I decided to brew the stout using a method I read about in a recent BYO, where for darker beers you partially mash the lighter grains and steep the darker grains. Apparently this is intended to lessen possible astringent flavors coming from the darker malts. I steeped chocolate, roasted barley and black patent malt in a gallon of water at 152 degrees for 45 minutes. At the same time, I mashed 2-Row, crystal 60, munich, and carapils. I added 4 lbs of DME to the boil and for the first time, I added a pound of lactose at the end of the boil. When I pitched the yeast, we were in the middle of a cold spell and my basement was on the cold side. The London yeast took a little bit of time to take off, and I wrapped a blanket around the carboy bringing the temp up to about 65, where it then took off. It was a fairly vigorous fermentation period and by the end of a week all signs pointed to it being done. No activity in the airlock and the yeast had dropped down.I racked the beer into a secondary fermenter on top of 42 oz of frozen sweet cherries. After the success of the Burning Beard, I decided to go this route as opposed to cherry juice. Here's where the problem came in though... I should have taken a reading prior to transferring the beer. The gravity was 1.030, not much of a drop from the original 1.052.
Not knowing exactly what to do, I threw in a packet of dry yeast I had lying around into the secondary. The next day I was obsessing as usual about the beer, and not able to access "alcohol/tobacco" sites from my school computer, I decided to email fellow brewers/blogger Ted and Dave who each gave me some feedback into the situation. Ted thought that the lactose could have caused the higher than average fg reading. Dave has thrown yeast into the secondary for his Impy Stouts in the past and was successful in dropping the final gravity down a couple points. They calmed my fears, and upon doing some research after I got home, I realize that it most likely will be fine. This morning I took a sample and while it hadn't dropped any points, it tasted very good. In the end I might end up with a tasty breakfast beer, since right now my abv is hovering a little under 3%, but there's a great cherry presence and some nice roasty-chocolate going on. I'll keep the progress posted.
Salud!
Bearded Brewer
4 comments:
Strangely enough I brewed a cherry stout a couple months ago, and it too ended up around 3% alcohol; I have no idea what caused it, and I couldn't get it below 1.025. It was very good, it just made for an odd mouthfeel.
I'll be interested to hear how the cherry stout turns out. I have my raspberry stout in secondary right now, and I should be bottling it soon. I've brewed with both real fruits and extracts, so it'll be interesting to see the differences.
Ryan,
Thanks for the comment. good to know that you had a similar situation that still ended up going well.
Starlight- how long did you keep yours in secondary? Was it on top of the raspberries?
I brewed a coffee stout back in November and used a pound of lactose in an effort to get a sweet balance with the 3/4 pound of coffee and 5 oz. of hops that I used. I was quite concerned when the gravity dropped from 1.052 to only 1.040.
I had plenty of visual evidence of fermentation, so my thought was that it was due to all the lactose. I told some of the guys at my homebrew club about using a full pound of it and they looked at me like I fell off my rocker. One of the guys did a really nice vanilla cocoa stout in the fall and used 1/4 pound in his.
The final result of my coffee stout turned out really well. It's thick as motor oil, but is pleasantly reminiscent of Founders Breakfast Stout. Alcohol or not, I was quite pleased with how it turned out.
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