Imperial Stout Oblivion: Russian Imperial Stout

Grain Bill:
17 # Rahr 2 Row
3 # US Caramel 80
1 # US Chocolate
.5 # Roasted Barley
.5 # Black Malt

Hops:
1.5 oz Chinook 13.5% AA 60 Min
.75 oz Columbus 13.9% AA 30 Min
.75 oz Columbus 13.9% AA 15 Min
.5 oz Chinook 13.5% AA 5 Min


Single Step Infusion at 154 F

Fly Sparge to 7.5 gallons.

Boil for 90 minutes down to 6 gallons. Expect to lost .5 gal to wort shrinkage

Cool to 68 degrees and pitch.

I currently have this bottle conditioning now. After sitting in primary for 3 weeks this beer tasted phenomenal! The late addition chinooks gave a bit of a resiny character that goes very well with the chocolate notes. My only reservation going in was that I was using a lot of different black malts. I was afraid it would make this taste ashy or burnt. It doesn't at all. This will definitely be held onto for a while. It's terrific now, but I can only imagine it will get better with age.

Note: The only difference to this vs what I actually made was I didn't pitch the US 05. We did this with a homebrew club at a local brewery. The brewers gave us all yeast right off their slurry. It was still chico though.

Here's a pic of a bottle:

nice label and wax

I brewed this same recipe 27 days ago. It looks amazing, and my efficiency was around 70% which suprized me for such a big beer. My only concern was that I under pitched alot. I use aerated oxygen and yeast nutrient, but I only added one vial of WLP007. Totally stupid of me. I hope this doesn't add any diacytel flavors to the beer.

I'm hoping that i can get my FG to at least 1.026. What did ya'll end up with?

Nevermind. I just read the OP and answered my own question.

pwkblue: Thanks. I never bottle. The only reason we did this was because we wanted to age this beer. I figured if I'm going to do it I'd do it right. That's a laser-printed polyester weather-proof label from onlinelabels.com

thd2146: That's a lot for 1 vial for sure. Hopefully just leaving it for a while will clean it up.

All I can say is this beer is going to be a standard winter brew. I may only do it once a year, but with a beer this big that should leave me with plenty of bottles to age.

thd: how'd it turn out? have you tasted it yet?

Opened the first bottle of it tonight. Spectacular! Malty, roasty, good chocolate presence and a a really nice hop bitterness to balance things out. This beer went over VERY well with a couple friends of mine.

Thanks!! Tastes awesome. I subbed northern brewer 60 min and target 30 & 15 hops because my home brew store didn't have your hops. Blew the lid off even with a blow off tube. Here's what the bottom of the lid looked like. Swapped in airlock after 2 weeks. OG 1.088 and FG 1.020 with S-04 yeast.

Mine finished at 1.028. I let it sit on the yeast for a while to clean it up from the under pitching. Turned out to be an epic batch! Everyone fell in love with it. It had a thick dark head and the texture was just right.
I can't even think of a way to improve it at all. I think on the next batch ill just pitch the right amount with a big starter and work on the cold side. Like keeping the temp consistent.

Thanks for the great recipe!

Did you use some priming sugar before bottling this?

This recipe sounds delicious! Sweet bottles BTW.

Was just wondering if anyone has tried doing an extract of this beer???

mcdong said:

Did you use some priming sugar before bottling this?

Click to expand...

I second this. I'm wondering about the carbonation in this.
What did you use to bottle/keg? What amount of sugar or what psi did you pressurize?

Also, I found out that my local store doesn't have Caramel 80, only Caramel 90 and caramel 60.
Instead of 3lbs of Caramel 80, do you think it would be okay to do 2lbs of Caramel 90 and 1lb of Caramel 60 to "even it out"?

Lighthoof, that should work just fine. It's not terribly uncommon to do when LHBS doesn't have the exact grain bill. It will even out.

On another, I'm brewing this exact recipe from the OP tomorrow afternoon. Really fired about it. It's my first imperial as well as the largest grain bill, to date. Should be fun! I'll post numbers tomorrow afternoon.