Caramel Macchiato Sout - Help with recipe

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dlm3

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Hello all, I would like to attempt to brew a "Caramel Macchiato Stout" as my second beer. Hopefully I'm not being too ambitious, but that's the point of home brewing, right?!

For those not familiar, a caramel macchiato is a Starbucks drink with steamed milk, espresso, caramel and vanilla syrups, and some caramel sauce drizzled on top. My idea was to make a flavorful, but easy drinking "breakfast beer" with flavors reminiscent of a caramel macchiato. Being a breakfast beer I want to keep the ABV lower at around 4 to 4.5% and would also like to incorporate oatmeal for some extra body and sweetness. Due to my current skill and equipment, this needs to be an extract recipe with steeped grains. I have heard that there is difficulty brewing oatmeal with an extract (something about it needing to be mashed with grains to be absorbed properly?) Can I put oats and crushed grain in a grain bag and steep to get the desired effect?


The key flavors I'm looking for are:

• Espresso - Use a few shots of espresso (8 - 10 oz?). Added to secondary and beer racked onto it from primary.

• Oatmeal - How can I do this with an extract brew?

• Caramel - Can I steep crushed caramel malts? What varieties should I use to get the right caramel flavor?

• Milk - Was thinking I could just add 1 lbs of lactose towards the end of the boil to accomplish this.

• Vanilla - Could I use some fresh Madagascar vanilla beans, cut and scraped? How many should I use and when should they be added?

• I was also thinking about using Munton's KreamyX to help ensure I have a nice creamy head (to sort of emulate steamed/frothed milk.) Any experience with this product? Any reason not to go this route?
I have no idea what hops to use with this brew. I'm open to suggestions. I'm sure the espresso will go a long ways in providing some bitterness for this beer, but I don't know how to pair hops with this.

In the end, I would like this to be a smooth, balanced brew, not too sweet and not over-powering, but the espresso flavor should be distinctive. I'm thinking something that drinks about like Guinness, but obviously with a different flavor profile.

Any help coming up with a recipe for this would be much appreciated!

Thanks!
-D.L.
 
I would look for a solid milk or sweet stout recipe, and the doctor it up with the coffee and vanilla. I have no idea about the caramel.
 
How does this sound, start with the Northern Brewer Sweet Stout kit:
http://www.northernbrewer.com/brewing/sweet-stout-extract-kit-2.html

Add a pound of Briess Caramel 80L crushed malt during steeping.
http://www.northernbrewer.com/brewing/brewing-ingredients/grain-malts/caramel-malts/briess-caramel-80l.html

Add a pot of strong brewed coffee to the secondary along with two cut and scraped Madagascar vanilla beans.

Use Munton's KreamyX instead of priming sugar at bottling.

I think that pretty much covers my bases except for the oatmeal, but that may have been a bit much anyway. I think this should be a good start.

My main remaining question is how much coffee should I use and how should I prepare it? Also, espresso or regular brewed coffee?
 
Also, I'm thinking about giving the Wyest 1945 NeoBritannia yeast a try with this, any thoughts?
 
Also, I'm thinking about giving the Wyest 1945 NeoBritannia yeast a try with this, any thoughts?


I wouldn't. It throws off some english esters which are nice in bitters and such, but would not go well in what your cookin'.

I would suggest something more neutral that would not contribute and flavors to your stout.
 
Thanks for the tip, the other option with the kit is Nottingham. From it's description I think it might work well, but I really don't have any experience to draw from. I could always opt not to include yeast with the kit then buy anything else along with my order instead. Any other suggestions, or stick with Nottingham?
 
Personally I would just brew the kit without adding the extra crystal.
I think a whole pot of coffee might be a bit much.
But have fun, brew what makes you happy.
 
If you want to do the coffee aspect you may want to cold brew it with some beer, then add it back into the main batch.

Finish the beer, take a sample and bring it to a coffee specialty place. Explain what you are looking for and with the sample they will be able to match up a nice roast. Bring it home and cold brew it with some beer. Then mix it into the main batch to your taste preferences.

A friend of mine has done this twice with two different brews and it comes out fantastic.
 
Try doing a partial mash...
While you can steep oats to get some of the benefits, they need mashed with a base malt to release any of their diatastic powers and get the most from them.

I do a minimash now with all the grains, usually 4-5lbs worth, and use 4-6lbs of malt extract to bring up the weight.


To answer your questions, I'd choose the following:

1lb - Caramel/Crystal malt 50-60 (Medium)
8+oz Chocolate malt (gives a bit of a coffee flavor)
6oz Black patent malt (gives the color, plus the roasty, coffee flavor)
12oz - 1lb Lactose
2lbs - American 2 row pale
1-1.25lbs Quick oats.
6lbs Amber LME
12-16oz French Pressed French Roast (STRONG) at flameout.

.75oz - Nugget (12%AA) - 60
.5oz East Kent Golding (5%AA) - 30
.5oz East Kent Golding - 15

A few vanilla beans, cut and scraped and put in the secondary for a couple weeks.

My calculations show
OG 1.065
FG 1.016
38 SRM
35 IBU
6.5% ABV

You may look at different hops...
 
Since you have so many flavors going on, I would just use Nottingham yeast--It's cheap and neutral. I would just go with the NB sweet stout kit to get a good base recipe. Add yourself some crystal and you should be in business with the rest of your additions IMO.
 
Are you saying to steep some crystal malt (like this) in addition to the Caramel 80L? How much of each do you think I should use?
 
Sorry for the confusion: caramel=crystal malt. They're just different names for the same thing.

I think that 12-16 oz of C-80 would be a good addition to up the caramel flavors.
 
I ordered the Sweet Stout kit and well as some others and equipment from Northern Brewer. One of the other kits that I'm planning on brewing soon is the Bourbon Barrel Porter (so that I can age it until next fall/winter). I'm using Wyeast 1728 Scottish yeast with the bourbon barrel and was wondering if I should re-pitch and use the same yeast with my caramel macchiato sweet stout as well, or if I should stick with the Nottingham? Any thoughts? I haven't decided for sure which brew I'm going to do first yet.
 
I think Cubslover's recipe looks sound.

You can do a 5 lb mini-mash in a kettle on the stovetop.

Bring your water up to 165* and immediately throw in your grains, loose.

This should get your mash temp to about 153* If it's within 5 degrees don't mess with it, if it isn't, adjust heat until you're there, then don't mess with heat.

Stir every 5 to 10 minutes during mash. Let it go at least 45min.

Here's the semi-tough part, separating your grains from your sweet wort.

You can do it with some household kitchen equipment though. A fine mesh strainer and another deep steel strainer on top of the first works well.

Stack the strainers over another pot, dump in your mash. You will likely have to do this in thirds or fourths. Each time you dump a fresh bit of mash in let it drain, then sparge over the top with a quart of ~170* water. This will loosen up the sticky sugars and flow them into your brew pot. Taste the spent grains after sparging, if they taste real sweet, sparge a little more.

Once the grains are separated, you're ready to start your boil, and the rest is just like making an extract batch.

This isn't the smoothest way of mashing, but it's worked well for me in the past.

Other than that, use fresh ingredients and you should have a really tasty brew.

Just my two cents. Good luck!
 
As far as adding the coffee and vanilla, should I just do that during bottling (add to bottling bucket then siphon beer on top), or should I secondary and give them a week or two together in the carboy before bottling?
 
I finally brewed this beer today. I had a few small issues. Originally I was planning on washing and repitching the yeast from my BBP, however I wasn't comfortable with how I harvested and didn't want to risk an infection so I just went with "Plan B", a pack of Nottingham.

Also, when pouring into my primary I spilled probably somewhere around half a liter of wort and didn't think about this when I was adding water to get up to 5 gallons. Per the markings on my primary, I'm actually a hair above 5 gallons. Interestingly, my OG measured at ~1.048, which is surprising since the kit says it should be 1.042 and I even lost a little wort. My only deviation from the kit/instructions was steeping the extra pound of 60L Crystal malt. Should steeping 1 extra pound of malt really increase the gravity that much?
 
I bottled this brew 9 days ago and sampled a few this past weekend. It's already carbed up nicely and I'm quite pleased with the result. However, I was hoping for a little more "creamy" mouth-feel. It really seems more like a porter than a Guinness Draught in this department. I used Muntons Kreamy-X for priming, any other tips for next time around to create a "creamier" stout?
 
Flaked oats lend a distinctly silky mouthfeel that might give you the creaminess you're looking for. You could try .5 - 1 lb. of those. For your carbonation, maybe shoot for 2.4-2.5 volumes of CO2 -- it'll help it from getting to bubbly and adding a strong carbonic bite (it'll still taste and feel carb'd, but will be a bit smoother).
 
Any news on how this turned out? I don't know how I missed this thread when I was researching for my own Caramel Macchiato stout recipe... Anyways, looks like our recipes were kind of similar. I can post it here if anyone's curious. The beer turned out really good. I think it needs a bit more vanilla flavor (maybe some oat would help in this respect), but it's definitely sweet. I like it as a nice after dinner dessert beer, but it also works as a nice morning breakfast coffee-replacement beer (24 oz of espresso was added after it was fully carbed). :ban:
 
It's been quite a while since I've had one, but most everyone that tried it really liked it. Considering it was one of my first few brews, I was very pleased. Even some people that don't typically drink dark beers enjoyed it. Below are my more detailed brew notes (formatting was lost during the copy/paste):

Caramel Macchiato Stout

3/20/2011


Brewed using the Northern Brewer Sweet Stout extract kit as the base for this beer.
Added 1lb of 60L Crystal malt during steeping (~25 minutes).
While pouring wort through strainer into primary, approximately one liter was spilled.
Brought volume up to 5 gallons by adding Hy-Vee water jugs, mix of drinking water and distilled.
Total volume was a little over 5 gallons.
OG measured ~1.048, 1.042 was expected per the kit instructions, if anything I expected it to be lower since some wort was lost.
6/26/11 - Crystal malt added ~ 0.004 to gravity
Aerated using tank pump and diffusion stone for 20 minutes.
Pitched one packet of Danstar Nottingham yeast, hydrated per instruction on packet.
Placed primary in office closet.
Pitched yeast at around 3:00, noticed bubbling had begun around 8:00pm. Current temp on primary reads 75, will have to move to basement if it doesn’t cool down.

4/1/2011 - 6:00pm


About two days after pitching originally fermentation was still over 70 degrees, so I moved to basement overnight, this brought the temperature well into the 60’s, but I think it stunned the yeast and caused a stuck fermentation. A week or so later it was at about 1.020.
Gently shaking the fermentor didn’t do a whole lot to reactivate the yeast.
Since gravity was still high (~1.019), today I hydrated and pitched an additional packet of Danstar Nottingham.

Cut and scraped 3 Madagascar vanilla beans, cut into thirds and soaked in Joss vodka for ~7-10 days.
4/9/11


Boiled cold-brewed coffee for about 10 minutes. Added bag (about 7 oz) of Muntons Kreamy-X priming sugar to coffee to avoid adding excess water. Ended up with approximately 1L of coffee/priming sugar solution.
Cooled coffee/sugar and poured into bottling bucked along with vanilla vodka/beans.
Bottled beer.
4/18/2011


Sampled a few bottles this past weekend. Great flavor, but lacking the “creamyness” I was hoping for. Was already nicely carbed after ~1 week in the bottle.
Next time I think I will try using 1 lbs of 90L or even 120L Caramel/Crystal malt instead of 60L and use 1 lbs of flaked oats to hopefully get a creamier mouth-feel.
 
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