Our holiday brew—yes, the holiday brew from last year—is still sweeter than we'd like, and we've given up on getting the beer to thin out any more on its own, after trying champagne yeast and various other gimmicks. This beer is intended to be blended with the holiday stout to thin out the brew; it's extra-hopped to help bring the hopping rate of the holiday stout back up, too. And if there's any left over, well, we'll have a couple of gallons of extra-hoppy stout in bottles to pull out here and there.

I'm going to call this batch Xtra Hoppy Rescue Stout until a better name becomes apparent.

BeerXML for this recipe, generated by BrewTarget.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 7 lb. Simpsons' Maris Otter pale malt
  • 2 lb. flaked barley
  • 1 lb. Proximity roasted barley
  • 1 oz. Magnum hops (14.4% A.A.) at 90 min.
  • 1 oz. Magnum hops (15.5% A.A.) at 90 min.
  • 1 packet Safale S-05, rehydrated in 1 cup tap water at 100℉.
  • 1 oz. medium-toast Hungarian oak cubes, added to the last gallon or so on 29 March.
  • ½ pouch Lalvin 71B, added to oaked version at bottling on 12 November.
  • 1 or 2 carbonation drops per bottle, depending on bottle size, added at bottling on 12 November.

Procedure

Dechlorinated ten gallons of water. Put grains into the grain bag and heated up water in the electric boil kettle to 160℉. Kept some room-temperature dechlorated water off to the side. Added hot and cool water to mash kettle to reach temperature of 120℉; mashed at that temperature, in the ten-gallon brew pot under a sleeping bag, for fifteen minutes. Continued heating water in the electric kettle to 190℉; added more hot water after the end of the protein rest to bring the temperature to 150℉. (That's intentionally high; I want a comparatively thin brew for blending.) Mashed for another hour under the sleeping bag—temperature fell to 152℉. Drained, recirculating to clarify, then sparged to bring yield to 5.5 gallons of wort at S.G. 1.023. Brought to boil in the electric kettle, started timer for 90 minutes after the hot break, then added all two ounces of hops. Cooled with the immersion chiller after the end of the boil, then drained into a sanitized plastic fermentation bucket. Aerated with a wire whisk, then added rehydrated yeast. Popped in a fermentation lock and filled it with vodka.

Brew day: 19 February 2020
Predicted original gravity: 1.0516
Measured original gravity: 1.036
Estimated IBUs: 109.0
Predicted final gravity 1.0129
Predicted ABV: 5.1

Yield: TBD; hopefully, about four gallons.

Observations

  • 2020-03-29: Blended most of the batch into batch 174, as intended. Mmmmm, delicious delicious blend. Remaining ¾ gal. to 1 gal. was racked into a new two-gallon bucket, and an ounce of Hungarian oak cubes was added.
  • 2020-11-12: Bottled remaining stout.