The stout recipe below is one of my house recipes. I’ve been brewing this stout recipe for a few years and tweaking each year. It makes a great holiday beer for the chocolate/coffee richness of the stout that is cut through with the mint. Enjoy!
Beer Type
Stout (Specialty) Recipe
Ingredients
Size: 5.5 gallon batch
Grains
- 1 lb black (patent) malt
- 1 lb caramel/crystal 80L
- .5 lb (8 oz) chocolate malt
Base Malt
- 10 lbs 2 row
Hops
- 1 oz Kent Golding @ 60 minutes left
- 1 oz Kent Golding @ 15 minutes left
Yeast
- S-04 (Safale)
Gravity
OG: 1.051
FG: 1.018
Beer Making Process
Started at 8am, ended at 1pm. Not bad for my BIAB (Brew in a Bag) process. I usually take my time and relax during brew days.
Started with 9 gallons of water. Added a campden tablet, which removes the chloramine in the tap water and helps keep it neutral (or so I read on the interwebs). Took me about 50 minutes to get up to a mash temp of 160F. Overshot my mash temp a bit, so had to stir to get it down to about 155F. My notes, if we are being exact, were to “stir like a motherfucker”.
Mashed for an hour, twisted my bag to drain and ended up with about 8.5 gallons for pre boil. Since I boil on my stove (see below) I recently added my electric heating element to speed things up. I’ve had no complaints so far and it really helps to speed things along.
Around 11am had the boil going, so added the first hop addition.
Meanwhile, sanitized in a bucket the tubing for the transfer from the kettle to the fermenter along with the airlock, blow off tube and fermenter. Kept some sanitizer aside to put into a spray bottle which is great when you need to sanitize quickly without whipping up a big batch.
Also kept some sanitizer to put in a growler for use with the blow off tube. This enables the beer to not have any baddies from floating into the fermenter from the blow off.
About 15 minutes from the end of the boil, add 1/2 oz of peppermint leaves (I prefer these, make sure they are pure peppermint). This adds up to about 10 tea bags of peppermint. I also add the chiller here to sanitize it. After 15 minutes is up, kill the heat and crank the chiller.
12:30p- Wort was down to about 80F. Filled up 5.5 gallons. 1 gallon left to trub (that gunky stuff left in the kettle, mainly hop residue). Pitched the yeast at 75F with the fermenter set to 65F.
Brewed 11/15/15.
Kegged 12/5/16. (First batch kegged, and not a bad stout recipe to be first)
Tasting Notes:
Solid beer. Even the non-beer drinkers gave it a go and enjoyed it. The peppermint is much stronger in the beginning and fades quicker with time. I would estimate about 3-4 weeks before the mint favor is faint. The typical stout flavors, over time, come to overpower it. So if you wait long enough, it’ll be a typical coffee/chocolate flavor stout. Still enjoyable but less peppermint. I love this stout recipe and will continue to keep it rotating on draft.