|BACKGROUND|

The final shoe has dropped on the “new year, new beer” brewday on the first of January. Not that this beer needed to be rushed. If anything, quite the opposite.

Having had a few beers with barrel aged coffee, and given the fact that I haven’t brewed an imperial stout in a long ass time, looking forward to the colder, actual winter that we’d get, I figured that it was a little overdue.

Oddly enough, a lot of things were going on while I was brewing this. One of the big ones was that Scott Janish was, coincidentally, also brewing up a Russian imperial stout, which he posted a little over a week into fermentation. It was definitely comforting to see someone like Scott doing something in line with what I was, including getting an absolutely horrible mash efficiency, which was something I had previously been both concerned and annoyed with.

On the other side of the coin, it seems like someone in my camp is a mole for Tired Hands to mine ideas for weird shit, as they also brewed a tiramisu beer. Granted, it’s an English dark mild, but… there may be some other ways that I’ve seen my style getting bit lately…

Also, while I was writing this, apparently JWB and Trillium also made a tiramisu imperial stout. Time to break out the tin foil hat because I’m getting brainraped.

One of the real challenges in brewing this was actually sourcing the barrel aged coffee. Since the door’s been thrown open, it’s decidedly become a bit of a craze, meaning that a great majority of the coffee is now exorbitantly priced and out of stock in 85% of the places I was trying to order. Luckily, I managed to get in contact with the fine people over at HappyMug Coffee and they were more than accommodating to help out, hooking me up with a pound of rum barrel aged coffee for a way better price than everyone else selling their stuff for like $20/8-12 oz. (looking at you, Modern Times >:c). If you’re out Pittsburgh way, or just want some really good coffee, give them a shout. I was hoping that I was going to pop their coffee beer cherry, but I’m not surprised (or mad) Voodoo got there before I did.

Ultimately, this batch was kinda a series of ups and downs. Little bit of a learning curve, but I think I came out for the better on it. And I got some sweet new equipment.

Without further ado, here’s how to make just another boring ol’ pastry stout for the tickers.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 154F for 60 min. (x2)

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 58%

Original Gravity: 1.108 // 25.7 P

Final Gravity: 1.024 // 6.1 P

Estimated ABV: 12.4%

IBUs: 35

Color: 98.5 EBC // 50 SRM

Recipe

Malts

20# Pearl | 70%

3# Malted Oats | 10.5%

2# Dark Chocolate |7%

1# Crystal 60 | 3.5%

1# Carafa II Special | 3.5%

1# Lactose| 3.5%

.5# Black Patent | 2%

Hops

1 oz. Cluster @ 60 min.

2 oz. Wilamette @ 45 min.

2 oz. Tettnang @ 15 min.

Yeast

Imperial Organic Darkness (fermented ~68F)

White Labs WLP090 – San Diego Super Yeast (fermented ~68F)

Water Shit

3-5 mL 88% Lactic Acid (x2, one per mash)

1.5 tsp Calcium Chloride (x2, one dose per mash)

Spices and Stuff

2# Stell D’Oro Margherite Cookies (3 packages, in mash)

3 oz. Cacao nibs (soaked in vodka, added post-ferm, 2 days)

1.5 Vanilla Beans (soaked in vodka, added post-ferm, 2 days)

5 oz. HappyMug Rum Barrel-Aged Coffee (whole bean, added post-ferm, 3 days)

.5# Amber Malt Extract (used in 2L starter)

|BREW LOG|

The second half of the new year’s brewday, partner to Ｔ Ｈ Ｉ Ｃ Ｃ, this was actually the first batch of the day, since the purees needed to thaw out.

Given the massive size of the grist, and the limiting factor that my poor old igloo cooler would tap out before getting all the shit in it, I opted to do two mashes instead of one. Unlike when I did my barleywine two years ago, I decided just to do two completely separate mashes instead of going for a full-blown reiterated mash. So, I cut my grain bill in half, meaning that each of my buckets of milled grain were about 14# of grain each. I also made the executive decision that I wasn’t going to age the beer on the cookies or put them in the boil, after a small fiasco I had with graham crackers in a pumkin beer many moons ago, so there was also about 1# of the margherite cookies, caringly crumbled by hand, dusted gently atop.

After heating the water to strike temp and a bit of water adjustment, both mashes came in right about where I wanted them. I was shooting for about 154F, which one came in slightly high and the other slightly low. Since I can do basic math, on average, I was gucci.

Since I was also using a generous amount of darker malts, I had dialed back a bit on the acid additions. I think I may have gone a little bit heavier on the first mash and pulled back a bit more on the second, but I will admit that notetaking during the brewday is not one of my stronger suits. Even with what was probably a small folly, both beers came in pretty in range for the mash pH as well. Harvesting some of the mash about 15 minutes in and taking a reading with a meter, both beers were within acceptable thresholds. Again, sliding in with a nice average.

For the first mash, I only collected first runnings, no sparging. I was shooting for as high a concentration as possible. At first, when I was sparging the second batch, I had checked the pre-boil gravity with a refractometer and was pretty disappointed. IIRC, the beer was clocking in ~1.090 something, which, I was adamant about this beer being at least 11%. This part was particularly disheartening, and also slightly annoying, because I spent a good chunk of change on the massive amount of malts for this beer. I had also forgotten the fact that with higher gravity beers, you also tend to get absolutely shit on with mash efficiency. In the end, it worked out okay, but at the time there was a good deal of angry pacing and muttering. It’s also worth noting that I think I need to recalibrate my refractometer anyways, because it gave me some real off numbers, hence why the more recent posts have had a move back to SG hydrometer readings.

In the end, I collected about 7-7.5 gallons of wort in the kettle, a beautiful inky, black in color. Even during the boil I knew that I got it right because it had that gorgeous coffee/khaki colored foam on top. If anything, the beer was going to look great.

Aside from the three hop additions, the boil was pretty uneventful. After an hour, the pump went on and the beer got chilled down to 70F and the yeast was pitched. As my first time working with anything from Imperial Organic, this was… interesting. While I thought the can design was super cool and unique, I will be the first to say that I’m happy they recently moved over to pouches, because fuck those cans. They are absolutely terrible for trying to pout a thick ass yeast slurry into the 2.5″ mouth of a carboy. Racked it into a 6 gallon carboy, hooked up the blowoff tube, and admired my handiwork.

And so began the usual waiting game. At least, the first round of it.

After two weeks, planning on bottling, I hit my dad up to take a gravity reading on the stout to see what was good. No airlock activity, no krausen. Should be done fermenting. The stout clocked in at 1.040. Fuck. That was way higher than I wanted. This should have at least double digits in the alcohol world, and that was just barely shy of 10%. I was super disappointed. Talked myself down, gave it another week – still 1.040. Shit.

Oddly enough, I had never actually run into a stalled fermentation before. Considering that I had done high gravity beers before with no issue, I chalked it up to underpitching, which is a salty ass pill to swallow with how Omega is very proud of their super high cell count per can and they’re also not a cheap yeast option either at $10 a pop. I think that was the real disappointment, especially since all the guys over at Brulosphy have only ever spoken highly of them.

So, like any desperate and thrifty brewer, it was time to do my personal specialty: fly by the seat of my pants. This means that I was done fucking around.

First order of business was to lay out the pan of action. I figured if underpitching/aerating was the problem, then we’re gonna give this beer a proper Nick Jonesing and hit it with O2 and a fresh strain of yeast. Now, this seems dangerous. Everyone knows that cold side aeration is the devil, but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound.

First step: make a giant ass starter. I was done fucking around at this point. I bought a 2L flask, bung and airlock at my LHBS along with a pack of WLP090 and a pound of DME. I dissolved .5# of DME in water, heated it to a simmer on the stove, and then cooled it in a water bath in my sink. Little bit of StarSan in the airlock, drop in the least, and let it ride.

This presented a very interesting situation for me. I have never really seen anything actively ferment before. As mentioned previously, either in posts here or on reddit, I typically brew at my dad’s house. The beers ferment in his basement. I come through, brew a batch or two, and drop that shit off like an orphan at an old Catholic church in the movies. It was kinda cool to see the starter fermenting for the few days I had it in my apartment. No stir plate meant there was a little bit of manual rousing every few hours, but other than that, Just a little hands free love and watching the airlock bubble away. I had a pretty sweet gif of it swirling and the CO2 bubbles, but I dunno what happened to it.

Second step: oxygenation rig. I got a .5 micron airstone on Amazon and a can of oxygen at Lowes. I had also ordered a regulator online for the can, but because safety in the welding industry is super important and people can’t be trusted not to put tanks on the wrong hook-ups, oxygen tanks are threaded in the opposite direction, meaning that the adapter was bunk. Luckily, my dad had an actual mini-torch welding set, which had a left handed thread for the tank. After afroneering up a quick rig with some silicone tubing and hose clams, we had an operational aerator.

Game time arrived during a bottling day for two other batches. I boiled the airstone to sterilize it and clean off any sort of residue, sanitized every other part of the rig, and hit the stout with 30 seconds of pure oxygen. After that, I added in the entire 2L start of Super Strain. Overkill? Possibly, but like I said, I was done fucking around. Fermentation kicked back and I let the beer ride another 2 weeks. After another round of gravity checks, the beer was down into the threshold I wanted, landing at a nice 1.024 – 12.4% alcohol. We got a biggun’.

With another brewday on the horizon, we decided that we’d bottle in the middle of the two batches. Or during a mash. Or something like that. But before that, the flavoring adjuncts had to go in. I had previously weighed out 5 oz. of the whole coffee beans during brew day, as well as the 3 oz. of cacao nibs, but then vanilla beans were easy too. The cacao and nilla went into a snack ziploc bag with just enough vodka to cover them and they chilled for two days. The coffee actually went in a day before the others, getting just an extra day of contact, and then the bag go dumped into the fermentor as well, getting to wait another two days before bottling.

I double checked the gravity, just to make sure that we were golden, and it clocked in at the same point as the week before. In total, we collected something close to 5 gallons of brew in the bottling bucket. Priming with ~3.3 oz. of table sugar/sucrose, I made a simple syrup, shooting for about 2.2 vol. CO2 for the stout. Gotta say, I was pretty impressed with the fact that it actually kinda tasted like tiramisu.

Since I had designed a relatively glitzy and opulent label for the beer, I also played around a bit with the wax this time, adding in some fine mica powder to give it a nice metallic/pearlescent shimmer to it. You know, put some gold on it. It looks pretty damn fancy. After that, we finished the brewday out and the beer got a week or two in bottles to carb up and chill.

Tasting Notes

Pouring out from a bottle, the beer is inky black and completely opaque, looking like a bottle of Castrol. Kicks up maybe a fingers worth of khaki/chocolate head, which fades super fast and leaves no lacing. I can only guess that this is because of the oils from the coffee beans just destroying the head retention, and they’re slightly visible on the surface.

Right out of the gates, this beer smells big. It’s got metrick fuckton of rum and coffee, followed by chocolate, vanilla, and a little hint of raisin and charcoal.

When the beer is on the cooler side, there’s pretty much three things I taste: rum, roasted malts, and a hit of the pepper coffee flavor. It’s actually a little boozy, but it stops shy of being too assertive, just hovering at the comfortable level of “okay, yeah, this is 12% alcohol”. However, letting the beer warm up a tad, the chocolate and vanilla start to blossom, the booziness fades, and your get left with this decadent chocolate-rum-coffee, kissed with vanilla, and with a twinge of date and charcoal/smoke in the finish. Pretty much exactly what I want in a behemoth stout.

Personally, it’s just a hair overcarbonated, but either a hard pour or a little time to settle down and you get a nice luscious coating on the palate. It stops a tad shy of motor oil, which I would have liked a little more thickness, but suffice it to say that it leans closer to the “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant” side of the mouthfeel scale than “Calista Flockhart”.

This beer is gnarkill. I got a lot more of the tiramisu at bottling, but the flavors are still there. They work in balance when served at the right temp, I get everything I wanted out of it, and I can automatically tell that this beer is going to only get better after a year in the cellar. I’m admittedly shocked just how much rum flavor is in this. Having brewed the straight coffee, you get it, and it perks up if you add a little cream and sugar (bleh, who does that?), but if I got served this blind and someone told me it was barrel-aged, I wouldn’t question them.

I’m super pleased with this beer. There were some learning curves, and definitely some adventures and learning opportunities along the way, but I suppose the ends justify them means. And I got some sweet new equipment out of the deal so… win/win?