At the end of 2016, I made an oatmeal stout to help to use up some dark grains I had laying around. It was based off of the oatmeal stout recipe in Brewing Classic Styles. Just to try something fun, I split off 1.5 gallons and added some mulling spices. Needless to say, it was tasty.

A few weeks after kegging, I brought some to my local club’s meeting, and someone said, “Hey! That smells like an oatmeal cookie!”. Not thinking much of it, I took the compliment and filed away the name.

Some quick background: My local homebrew club (at the time the Cedar Rapids Beer Nuts) runs quarterly style competitions. 1st place gets 3 points, 2nd gets 2 points, and 3rd gets 1 point. At the end of the year, the points are aggregated and the winner is named “homebrewer of the year”, and receives a tap handle and a bag of base malt. I decided that this year (2018), going into my 8th year homebrewing, I was going to dive into the competition scene and put my beer out there to be judged. This past fall, when I found out that the January turn-in category was 30C: Winter Seasonal Beer, I knew that I would brew that beer again.

I decided to make a few adjustments to the original recipe, namely swapping out some base malt for more oats, and upping the gravity to match the 6+% ABV suggestion from the BJCP guidelines.

Not Your G-Ma’s Oatmeal Cookie

Recipe Stats:

Batch Size: 3 gallons

Target OG: 1.066

Target IBU: 34.7

Efficiency: 83%

Boil: 60 min

Fermentables:

5.00lb Thomas Fawcett Halcyon Pale Malt

1.00lb Flaked Oats

1.00lb Malted Oats

8.00oz Pale Chocolate Malt

5.00oz Aromatic Malt

3.00oz Black Malt

Hops:

0.50oz Nugget (13%AA) @ 60min

0.25oz East Kent Goldings (4.5%AA) @ 10min

1.00oz East Kent Goldings (4.5%AA) @ Flameout

Yeast:

Irish Ale Blend (WY and WLP Irish ale blended, 3rd gen as blend)

Mash:

3.0 gallons @ 156F for 60 minutes; infuse @ 169F

1.79 gallons @ 165F for 15 minutes; infuse @ 189F

Notes:

Brewed on 11/6/2017, OG of 1.068

Kegged on 12/12/2017, FG of 1.012; 7.37% ABV, kegged with mulling spices in bag. Used 1oz (28g) of mulling spices for 3 gallons.

12/20/2017 Noticed that the beer was a bit thin, probably due to the systematic infection I’ve been dealing with. Figured out with this beer that it’s saison yeast that snuck into my Irish Ale blend!

1/15/2018 3.2oz of Malto-dextrin was added to 400ml of water and boiled, then added to keg to add some body. Worked well!

Appearance:

Very dark brown, nearly black body. Clear. Cream colored head.

Aroma:

So. Many. Spices. Nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, and allspice all float around here. Everyone I’ve given this to gets something different out of it.

Flavor:

Clove, with plenty of fruity esters. A bit of malt, and on the sweet side of things. A touch of diacetyl provides a slick mouthfeel, adding to the overall “ompf” of the spices. Despite the later additions, there’s not much hop flavor and aroma, though I’m sure that’s been over-run by the spice addition.

Club Comp Score: X/50

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