ishkabibble

Recipes 

STUCK...
I have an all-grain oatmeal stout on the horizon, and I was wondering if anyone had any tips on preventing a stuck lauter. I'm adding 1# of flaked oatmeal to the basic Palmer stout recipe, and everyone everywhere cautions that I'm not going to be able to drain the dern tun. I've read that some people just give the drain line a quick windy, but I'd like to prevent having a pic of that somehow end up on a reputable forum.

CHOCOLATE...
I'd also like to flavor said stout with chocolate--does anyone have a tried/true ratio for chocolate to wort volume? And I assume I can just add some squares of baker's chocolate to the pot immediately after the boil?

(This chocolate business makes me nervous because I've had chocolate "break" before when being introduced to h2o, and I don't want a brew pot full of hot schmutz.)

__________________
"Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it." -- the Woodman

ChessRockwell

Recipes 

Rice hulls!

__________________

T-Dan

Recipes 

I have had issues with slow draining tuns while using oatmeal too. luckily they have eventually drained, but it took some time. and that is with rice hulls included. I think I will skip the oatmeal in the future personally.

As for chocolate, I had very good luck using hershey's cocoa powder. 8 oz. gave a nice chocolate flavor to a chocolate milk stout I made. I added it with 15 minutes left in the boil.

RM-MN

Recipes 

Two items for you to think about.
1. BIAB. Never a stuck lauter or sparge even with lots of wheat or oats.
2. Chocolate malt gives a hint of chocolate flavor without adding real chocolate.

ishkabibble

Recipes 

rice hulls? who the fart thinks of this stuff? who knew rice had hulls? what about unsalted, unroasted peanut shells?

maybe i'll just skip the whole thing as it seems like a pita. thanks for the help on this.

__________________
"Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it." -- the Woodman

kylevester

Recipes 

The size of the peanut shells is probably too big to help, unless you can crush them reliably to the size of grain husks.

As for rice having hulls, since it's a grain it has a husk. Whether you end up with a stuck lauter or not depends on your mash tun geometry and your manifold. I use a bazooka tube and have done mashes of 50% rye with no problem, had I used a slit manifold I probably would have gotten a stuck mash. One pound of oatmeal is unlikely to stick the mash, but 1/2 to a full pound of rice hulls will provide insurance and are cheap.

kylevester

Recipes 

Oh, and I'm not sure what flavors you'll get from peanut shells, so better to stick with something we know is neutral.

ChessRockwell

Recipes 

Rice hulls worked really well for me when I was using a lot of rye in the mash... Haven't tried it with oats though.

__________________

KarlHungus76

Recipes 

+1. They're cheap and impart no flavor. Helps to prevent stuck sparges. I just throw a couple handfuls in when I'm using something that will thicken the mash I.e. wheat, rye, oatmeal, flaked barley. They work.

__________________
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy"
-Tom Waits

ishkabibble

Recipes 

thanks for the tips. i have the steel braided sleeve of a dishwasher tube for a filter. i'm sure that'd get just as gummy as a slit manifold. rice hulls sound like a classic diy solution, and a great way to repurpose what is essentially garbage.

just to push the envelope on this--say i don't have rice hulls, say i have no access to them before this weekend's brew--could i pass the lautered wort through a muslin bag of flaked oats in my brew pot, or even leave a muslin bag of oats in the brew pot as it comes up to temperature?

__________________
"Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it." -- the Woodman