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Patrick Beaumont

Patrick Beaumont

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Hi Everyone. My name is Patrick and I started having a go at brewing my own imperial stouts about a year ago. So far I've got a basic mashing tun and have been making 10 litre batches whilst I learn. I'm planning on doing a 15 litre batch at the weekend with the following recipe. Feel free to offer your opinions and critiques.
15 litres water
2250g dark malt extract (mangrove jacks’s bag)
3000g Dark brown soft sugar (lidl)
1500g dextrose
750g malto dextrin
200g flaked barley
400g crushed chocolate malt
200g roasted barley
200g carahels
200g carapil
150g acid reducer
10g dried yeast (mango jacks kveik m12)

I did a similar recipe but 10 liters a few months ago and it came out about 10% abv and was pretty drinkable straight from the barrel. I've then been flavouring the stout by steeping things like coffee beans, cherries and other flavourings.

Right now I'm working on trying to improve head retention and get a bit of bottle conditioning going.
 
Patrick Beaumont said:
Hi Everyone. My name is Patrick and I started having a go at brewing my own imperial stouts about a year ago. So far I've got a basic mashing tun and have been making 10 litre batches whilst I learn. I'm planning on doing a 15 litre batch at the weekend with the following recipe. Feel free to offer your opinions and critiques.
15 litres water
2250g dark malt extract (mangrove jacks’s bag)
3000g Dark brown soft sugar (lidl)
1500g dextrose
750g malto dextrin
200g flaked barley
400g crushed chocolate malt
200g roasted barley
200g carahels
200g carapil
150g acid reducer
10g dried yeast (mango jacks kveik m12)

I did a similar recipe but 10 liters a few months ago and it came out about 10% abv and was pretty drinkable straight from the barrel. I've then been flavouring the stout by steeping things like coffee beans, cherries and other flavourings.

Right now I'm working on trying to improve head retention and get a bit of bottle conditioning going.
Click to expand...
sounds nice fancy doing an idiots guide of how to as this seems at less involved than full AG
 
old dog new tricks said:
sounds nice fancy doing an idiots guide of how to as this seems at less involved than full AG
Click to expand...
Brew 16 - Ris-ky business - RIS attempt - 20/03/2016 dull gold - brewdog homebrew comp finalist 7th / 300+

Malt & Sugar:

2kg very dark dme
2kg medium dme
500g dwe
250g dark candi sugar

Grains:

250g choc
250g carafa special III
250g roasted barley
500g dark crystal

steeping in 2litres chase spring water
strike temp 76.8 - mash/steep temp 65c - 1 hour
rinsed with 2 litres water at 50 degrees
added 4 litres to boil
and 4kg dme and candi sugar boiled for 15 min
50g mandarina bavaria in 1 litre of water separate 15 min boil
all pitched into fv and final 500g DWE stirred in.
topped up to 22 litres(determined to end up with 20 litres of beer) = 60 x 33cl bottles!
Mj belgian ale yeast rehydrated in 150ml 30deg water
pitched at 29 degrees - fermenting at 22

og 1090 - fg 1011.
10.37%

tastes very drinkable out of the sample jar, rich chocolate hints with dark fruits and sherry hints. Super now!
fabulous level of sweetness - not sickly balanced with a light bitterness. superb.
what a fantastic dessert beer :-)
primed with 150g sugar
 
dad_of_jon said:
Brew 16 - Ris-ky business - RIS attempt - 20/03/2016 dull gold - brewdog homebrew comp finalist 7th / 300+

Malt & Sugar:

2kg very dark dme
2kg medium dme
500g dwe
250g dark candi sugar

Grains:

250g choc
250g carafa special III
250g roasted barley
500g dark crystal

steeping in 2litres chase spring water
strike temp 76.8 - mash/steep temp 65c - 1 hour
rinsed with 2 litres water at 50 degrees
added 4 litres to boil
and 4kg dme and candi sugar boiled for 15 min
50g mandarina bavaria in 1 litre of water separate 15 min boil
all pitched into fv and final 500g DWE stirred in.
topped up to 22 litres(determined to end up with 20 litres of beer) = 60 x 33cl bottles!
Mj belgian ale yeast rehydrated in 150ml 30deg water
pitched at 29 degrees - fermenting at 22

og 1090 - fg 1011.
10.37%

tastes very drinkable out of the sample jar, rich chocolate hints with dark fruits and sherry hints. Super now!
fabulous level of sweetness - not sickly balanced with a light bitterness. superb.
what a fantastic dessert beer :-)
primed with 150g sugar
Click to expand...
Can I be really think DWE? Used dried malt extract
 
I'm on holiday at the moment but when I get back fermentation should have just about finished. Assuming it comes out ok I can write up a rough guide but I'll confess my technique isn't particularly advanced. I basically dissolve all the sugar and extract in my mashing tun. Then stick all the dry ingredients in to a bag and lower that in to the sugar water. Let it mash for about an hour at roughly 70 celsius. Then drain everything out of the mashing tun in to a keg. Let it cool down to about 30 celsius on a heating pad. Pop the yeast in. Pop the cap on the keg. Leave it for 2 to 3 weeks occasionally testing the specific gravity by taking a little out of the tap on the keg.

At some point I'd like to look in to bottling before fermentation is fully finished so I can do the bottle conditioning without having to add extra sugar and yeast. Since I'm brewing up to 10% plus ABV trying to condition afterwards is proving tricky. At least I assume it is the high ABV that is making the conditioning process tricky.
 
So I've just taken my first sample from the barrel after leaving it for over a month. OG was 1.13, SG now is 1.06 so roughly a 9% ABV. I was hoping for a bit more to be honest. I'm starting to wonder if I've got the conditions right for this Mango Jack Kveik yeast. Theoretically it should go higher but all my attempts with the yeast seem to stall out at 10%.

PH is 5.1

Flavour is nice. Maybe a little sweeter and fruitier than I was after but very drinkable. Given there is still quite a bit of sugar left in the stout I'm wondering how possible it would be to somehow restart the fermentation to get up to a higher ABV.
 
Patrick Beaumont said:
At some point I'd like to look in to bottling before fermentation is fully finished so I can do the bottle conditioning without having to add extra sugar and yeast. Since I'm brewing up to 10% plus ABV trying to condition afterwards is proving tricky. At least I assume it is the high ABV that is making the conditioning process tricky.
Click to expand...
Conditioning can be difficult with high abv. I've had some take a year or more. I would be wary of bottling before fermentation had finished since you don't really know when it's going to finish--see post #11. I'd be inclined to leave these high gravity beers in the fermenter for weeks, if not months, before bottling. And then use a bottling yeast like F2, which is basically a champagne or cider yeast, as far as I can see.
 
Patrick Beaumont said:
So I've just taken my first sample from the barrel after leaving it for over a month. OG was 1.13, SG now is 1.06 so roughly a 9% ABV. I was hoping for a bit more to be honest. I'm starting to wonder if I've got the conditions right for this Mango Jack Kveik yeast. Theoretically it should go higher but all my attempts with the yeast seem to stall out at 10%.

PH is 5.1

Flavour is nice. Maybe a little sweeter and fruitier than I was after but very drinkable. Given there is still quite a bit of sugar left in the stout I'm wondering how possible it would be to somehow restart the fermentation to get up to a higher ABV.
Click to expand...
For such a big beer I think you stressed out the 10 gram of yeast, apparent attenuation of only 51%. One trick is to halve the batch, pitch the yeast in half the batch then add the other half 24 hours later. Or you could have just added more yeast.
 
foxy said:
For such a big beer I think you stressed out the 10 gram of yeast, apparent attenuation of only 51%. One trick is to halve the batch, pitch the yeast in half the batch then add the other half 24 hours later. Or you could have just added more yeast.
Click to expand...
Interesting. According to website for the yeast a 10g packet should handle 20 liters https://mangrovejacks.com/products/kveik-yeast-10g but I could try adding some more. I'll let the barrel sit another week and test again. See if any further fermentation has occurred.

Head retention - I've just been adding more Carahell and Carapil malt to the mash in the hopes that if I do get a bit of foam to form when pouring that the bubbles will hang around for a while.
 
Patrick Beaumont said:
Interesting. According to website for the yeast a 10g packet should handle 20 liters https://mangrovejacks.com/products/kveik-yeast-10g but I could try adding some more. I'll let the barrel sit another week and test again. See if any further fermentation has occurred.

Head retention - I've just been adding more Carahell and Carapil malt to the mash in the hopes that if I do get a bit of foam to form when pouring that the bubbles will hang around for a while.
Click to expand...
Well, you can make 10g of yeast work as I said. Splitting the wort is like making a big starter so when you add the rest of the wort there are enough yeast cells to get the job done. I don't know what density of wort the 10g of M12 can handle but I doubt it would be 1,13.
That is why you have low attenuation and a sweet taste to your beer still unfermented sugar in there, which leads me to ask why so much maltodextrin.
 
Yeast size - I'm still learning about yeast. My naive assumption was that the yeast would reproduce so long as there was sugar left and the ABV wasn't too high. So you could in effect start with 1g of yeast and eventually over time the yeast would eat all sugar it would just take longer than starting with 10g of yeast. However reading a bit more suggests that the conditions for yeast reproducing are different from the conditions for fermenting so you do need to start with the right amount of yeast as there won't be much reproduction happening in a sealed fermenting vessel. Is that right?

Maltodextrin - I was trying to create more of a dessert stout with a creamy mouth feel. My thinking being that if the yeast doesn't consume the Maltodextrin then it will add the necessary sweetness and mouthful without me having to add anything after fermentation is done. However I may have added a bit too much so I might reduce the amount of Maltodextrin on a future batch. If I can get fermentation to restart on this batch I should be able to get a better feel for how sweet the stout is after the other sugars have fermented.
 
Welcome.

Sounds like you've been making some real big hitters! I find they develop in the bottle and are much more rounded after a few months.

As for head, I find adding a small amount of flaked oats or carapils malt helps.
 

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