Imperial Stout Recipe Check

[Zephyr259]

Hi Folks, brewing an imperial stout next week and I'm looking for some thoughts on the recipe. It started off as the Black is Beautiful recipe but with some subs for malts I already have, then simplified a touch and scaled up to 1.100 OG, but it's a lot of roast malt and don't want to make something undrinkabley roasty.

For 15 L at 1.100, 70% mash efficiency
4.5kg pale malt (60%)
800g imperial malt (11%)
400g chocolate malt, 900 ebc (5%)
400g roasted rye, 500 ebc (5%)
300g crystal, 150 ebc (4%)
300g Simpsons DRC (4%)

The missing 11% is made up of 800g invert syrup, going for a "black invert" made with 715g golden syrup and 85g blackstrap molasses. This will help me hit the gravity I want as well as keeping the FG a bit lower.

Hops are 35g Admiral at 60 min and another 35g at 15 min for a total of 74 IBU which should balance the 1.100 OG, original recipe was 60 IBU vs 1.080 so I'm at the same ratio.

FG is expected about 1.023 assuming the invert fully ferments, and I'm using Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale.

Sound reasonable? I've decided to drop the cherry addition, if this beer turns out well then I'll have a good starting point for a cherry one in the future.

Thanks

 

[Braindead]

Love DRC one of my fav malts for my stouts

 

[Oneflewover]

Looks good, but I do think that there might be too much roasted rye in there for 15l. Having said that I've never brewed an imperial stout, just using stouts I have brewed as a reference point.....

 

[strange-steve]

I don't think the roasted malts are unreasonably high, one of my RIS recipes was 11% chocolate malt and 8% roasted barley and it turned out great (actually scored 43 in a BJCP competition), but the FG was quite high which helped balance the bitterness from the roasted malts. The recipe is here if you fancy a look: NHC Gold Medal RIS

 

[pilgrimhudd]

Looks good to me! What are you doing with the golden syrup and molasses, you just chucking all that in during the boil or are you mixing/heating it first?

 

[Zephyr259]

Hi Folks, for some reason I didn't get any notifications for replies past Braindead's so just stumbled across these. I was going to mash this overnight on Monday and boil on Tuesday but for various reasons I couldn't be bothered so it's on hold for a few weeks. Thanks for the comments.

@Oneflewover You might be right, I've not used it before other than with a tiny addition to a 60/-, the original recipe called for roast barley which I don't have so thought I'd use the rye instead even though it's much lighter.

@strange-steve 20% roasted malt would be intense, but 1.032 is a good FG to balance it as you said. I'll have a look over your recipe, that's a brilliant score.

@pilgrimhudd I'll combine them in a bowl and add some of the hot wort to them so they're looser and easier to mix in, otherwise it'll be a pain to scrape out while also preventing them from scorching in the boiler.