Oatmeal Stout Experiment
Sometimes I get impatient. Sometimes I get bored. Other times I feel creative. Yet other times I am torn. I brewed an Oatmeal Stout about 2 weeks ago. It was a fine brew day, nothing to brag about, and I had thought about splitting the batch of beer later to try a couple different flavors from one batch.
Well, when the time came around to split the batch, I couldn’t make up my mind – so I split the batch 5 ways – 5 one gallon secondaries. I think it is going to be a cool idea in the long run, sure there is a higher chance of infection and oxydation by messing around with the beer so much, and bottling day is going to be a royal pain in the ass, but it is a neat idea to be able to squeeze 5 different yet similar beers from one batch. Honestly, the only thing I’d do differently is acquire one gallon glass jugs versus using plastic again.
Originally I was thinking of splitting the batch and making half of it a Vanilla Bourbon Oaked Oatmeal Stout. Sounds pretty tasty to me. But, then I started reading about a specialty category in the More Beer competition coming up in May. Basically they are going to have a seperate category for beers made with pre-sweetened cereals. Well, I thought this sounded like fun, but didn’t want to blow a whole batch if it came out tasting like ass – so I thought, ‘what if I pull off one gallon from this batch and just mess with that?’ Well, that thought then lead me to the thought of splitting it five ways and playing around quite a bit.
These are the flavors I decided to go with: -1- an “Ordinary” Oatmeal Stout, this one is kind of my control to compare and contrast the others to, nothing extra was added to this beer in secondary. -2- A Vanilla Oatmeal Stout, for this one I used one half of a fresh vanilla bean, split, scraped and cut and added to the secondary. -3- A Bourbon Oaked Oatmeal Stout, for this one I soaked medium roast French oak chips on Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon for a week, I then added approximately three table spoons of soaked chips and one table spoon of oaked liquid bourbon to the secondary. -4- A Cocoa Pebble Oatmeal Stout, for this one I soaked one gallon of beer on one box (13oz.) of Cocoa Pebbles for approximately ten minutes and the liquid reserve was added to the secondary. A third to a quarter of a gallon was absorbed by the Pebbles. and finally -5- A Coffee Oatmeal Stout, sounds like breakfast to me, for this one I added four table spoons of fresh ground French roast coffee to the secondary, some people have called this “dry beaning”. Most of these additions are pure guesses for the volume needed to add to reach the desired results – we’ll see!
I have hope for all of the different flavors, I’m thinking some blending could even happen on bottling day – well hope for them all besides the Cocoa Pebble one, that one is more or less a shot in the dark. I figured I’d let everything hang out in the secondary for at least a week maybe two, it really all depends on how much time I have – I’d also like to brew either this coming weekend or the next. Next batch will be an English Pale Ale – maybe I’ll pull a gallon of that and throw it on some Fruit Loops or Lucky Charms – or maybe not!
January 15th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
[…] see what I could enjoy but not miss per say. What I came up with was one of my homebrews from the Oatmeal Stout Experiment from February/March of ‘07. It was the Bourbon Oaked Oatmeal Stout and it was creamy and […]