KBS Clone Recipe in Zymurgy!

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JOHN51277

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I haver tried this one with not so great results. I was flipping through the new Zymurgy mag and came across the recipe given by Jeremy Kosmicki. While not the exact recipe, it should be close.


5 US Gallons

13.25 lbs pale malt
1.5 lbs flaked oats
.75 lb roasted barley
.75 lb Belgian choc. malt
.50 lb Belgian debittered black malt
.5 lb 120L crystal malt

Hops

1.0 oz Nugget 13% aa (60 mins)
1.25 oz Willamette 5% aa (25 mins)
1.75 oz Willamette 5% aa (10 mins)

2.5 oz Belgian bittersweet chocolate (15 mins)
1.5 oz unsweetened cocoa nibs (15 mins)
2.0 oz ground Sumatran coffee (flameout)
2.0 oz cold-brewed Kona coffee (secondary)

American or California Ale yeast

Boil Time 90 mins
IBU. 73
SRM 60
Specific gravity 1.092
Assumed Efficiency 75%

Infusion Mash at 155F for 60 mins. Add Hops, chocolate, and coffee as specified. Ferment for 2 weeks at 65F. Soak .25 oz French Oak chips in one cup Kentucky Bourbon for 2 days. Soak ground kona coffee in 1 cup boiled, cooled water and leave overnight, covered in refrigeratro. Strain out grounds and add cold coffee and bourbon, with wood chips to secondary. Rack fermented stout into this mixture and condition in secondary at 55-60F for 2-6 mos.




I will be trying this recipe very very soon. This is one of my absolute favorites and I just cannot get it here in FL. Thank God I have friends in low places, er......I mean North places!!!
 
Yeah there's also one in there for Racer 5 which I noticed that except for a couple of minor changes is very similar to my own IPA recipe.

I knew there was a reason I liked that beer. :)
 
I made something almost identical and it turned out great! I didn't use the nibs and just added more bittersweet chocolate in the boil. i loved using the cold brewed coffee also.
 
I have seen this recipe or very close to it in other places. I plan to take a stab at it in a few weeks but using ingredients I have on-hand (carafa special II instead of debittered black and a blend of British chocolate and pale chocolate, Magnum instead of Nugget). I plan to age it a whiskey barrel.

First I'm going to make a low gravity 5 gal batch and use the cake for this batch (Pacman yeast).

I've never had the real thing, not even the reg breakfast stout nor CBS.
 
I am ordering the grains for this and will be brewing it this weekend, hopefully! If it makes it to me by Friday. I wonder if anyone has actually come close to the real thing. This sounds like it will be better than my previous attempts.
 
I just got around to brewing this up on Sunday. It is the thickest, muddiest looking wort I have ever brewed up, EVER!!! It smells soooo good, and I cannot wait to drink this!

Here is a vid with about 40 mins left in the boil.


 
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Yeah, I will have plenty of washed yeast from this one!
There's going to be a thick layer of chocolate pudding on top of that yeast cake. And with a beer this big you prob don't want to wash/save the yeast anyway.

I'm brewing mine this coming weekend using the washed cake from a 1.048 OG ale. I think I'm gonna bail on the 'Kentucky' part of it and just make a regular Breakfast Stout.
 
OG was 1.091. I checked gravity last night and am sitting at 1.032, which is 7.74% ABV so far. The US-05 is slowing some, but still chugging along!

I took the gravity sample and poured it into a frozen mug to cool it down, and DAMN is it great. The chocolate is perfect! The coffee is very subtle, but will get 2 cups of cold pressed Kona coffee at secondary along with bourbon and oak!
I can't wait to start drinking this stuff! I believe it will be very close to KBS!
 
I'm 3 days into primary on this recipe. Tasted great post-boil and it was fun to brew something so dark. Other than my first time brew-buddy dropping a pretzel into the wort while we were chilling, everything went pretty well.

Is .25oz. of oak chips enough for this recipe? I don't want to overdo it, but I recall most recipes calling for 1 - 2 ounces. Anybody care to comment on the right amount of oak?
 
I used 2 oz of oak, and 6 oz of bourbon. I will know in about 2-3 weeks. I will be kegging this weekend.
 
BTW - did anybody else who brewed this keep getting their auto-siphon clogged by those damn cocao nibs? I had a hell of a time transferring from kettle to primary.
 
BTW - did anybody else who brewed this keep getting their auto-siphon clogged by those damn cocao nibs? I had a hell of a time transferring from kettle to primary.


I couldnt find the nibs so I used unsweetened bakers chocolate. Made it a lot easier. But I did have a S--- ton of trub after primary was done.
 
Finally kegged this on Sunday. I cannot wait to start drinking this stuff. It is like Syrup made from Gold!!
 
I have made a version of this a bunch of times. The stout without the bourbon is fantastic. Actually I used this as a base for a Blueberry stout I did for the usa world cup opener. Red/white/blue brews. Be careful with those oak chips though. I still have bottles from a year and a half ago that taste like an Oak tree. 1oz of chips-2.5 gallons for 2 weeks was way too long.
 
I have made a version of this a bunch of times. The stout without the bourbon is fantastic. Actually I used this as a base for a Blueberry stout I did for the usa world cup opener. Red/white/blue brews. Be careful with those oak chips though. I still have bottles from a year and a half ago that taste like an Oak tree. 1oz of chips-2.5 gallons for 2 weeks was way too long.

So, better to wait until about a week before bottling to add the oak chips? I've been debating what to do. I'm almost at week 2 and the recipe says to add the chips to the secondary which would leave them in there for about 5 months.
 
Ya I would definitely not leave the oak in there for 5 months. You could do a trietary, but that is just a pita. If you are going to bulk age hold off until bottling time.
 
Will do, thanks. What about adding the bourbon? Should that go in at 2 weeks without the oak, then? Or is the bourbon there more to sterilize the oak chips than anything else, so hold off until just before bottling?
 
The bourbon is definitely there to sterilize the oak plus it adds flavor to the beer. How much bourbon you add depends on how you like your KBS. This past years KBS was way more bourbony than the last.
 
First, in which issue of Zymurgy! did this recipe appear?

Second, do any of those who have brewed this recipe have any results that they wish to report? I am very curious to see how this beer turned out.
 
we are planning a group brew with our club and adding it to a bourbon barrel instead of using chips/bourbon. many of us will need to go partial extract to get that gravity. interested in seeing how it turned out for others too.
 
Racking to secondary today. Started at 1.100 and ended at 1.018 in two weeks. Still some very slow bubbling, but it's dry enough for this beer. I subbed in a couple of pounds of sugar for some of the two row to get down low enough.

My hydro sample tasted very strongly of coffee. I'm thinking of holding off the secondary coffee for now. Anyone else think that the 2 oz at the end of boil comes out pretty strong? It's fantastic, I just don't want to go stronger on the coffee.

I'm going to stick with the very small oak addition and leave it in the secondary. I'll let you know how that comes out.
 
I've had this sitting in secondary for over a month now so I can't speak directly for the KBS. But I did make the regular Breakfast Stout clone which has the same amount of coffee in the recipe 10 months ago. I'm down to my last couple of bottles now and I can say that there was definitely a decline in coffee flavor over time. Much the same as hop flavor declines.

It probably was at peak balance around the 6 month mark and now the chocolate is more overt. Given the fact that the KBS needs to be aged much longer, I wouldn't worry about the extra coffee, especially with the other complex flavors in this beer.
 
FINALLY going to bottle this over Thanksgiving weekend. I haven't bottled a beer (due to kegging) in over 9 years. Any tips or suggestions on the amount of priming sugar to use. I've read elsewhere that higher gravity beers use less sugar. Thanks.
 
mattjmac,

How was the coffee flavor in your's? It looks like we brewed this about the same time, I brewed on 8/13. Tasted yesterday and it was great. The bourbon has mellowed into the background, oak is coming out but not overtly, but the coffee flavor is completely gone. Mine came out a lot stronger than the recipe. My mash was too efficient and instead of an OG of 1.092, I hit 1.11! I'm wondering if the coffee got lost in all the malt.

Anyhow, SWMBO and I both think it's ready for bottling, but I'm thinking of adding another infusion of cold press coffee at bottling. However, I'm worried that the coffee will become too strong then. Any opinions???

Cheers!
 
My brew buddies and I are bottling this tomorrow (while doing a Bourbon County Stout vertical tasting from '07 to '10 and cracking open one of my bottles of Dark Lord!) I haven't tasted it since I transferred to secondary way back at the end of August. I'll be sure to reply back here with the results and I'll let you know how the coffee taste is. I'm actually glad to hear you say the coffee taste is almost nonexistent...I was really concerned with the amount of coffee this recipe called for and was afraid the coffee taste would be overpowering.
 
I don't see where the OP posted how the finished product was... did I miss it or do we need to endlessly harass him? :D
 
Not sure about the OP's results, but I can say that we bottled this today and the coffee flavor was dominant closely followed by chocolate. We are all very excited to see how this turns out in a few weeks. I'd say if you can't taste the coffee a cold-pressed addition at bottling couldn't hurt things. Let me know how it turns out.
 
Nice. I couldn't make up my mind so I'm doing both. Half sans extra coffee, half with. Bottling tomorrow! This beer already tastes great. Can wait to see how it turns out in a few week, a few months, next year!
 
What F.G. did you guys end up with (before the bourbon)? I used WYeast Irish Ale 1084 and it is struggling to get below 1.030, O.G. was 1.092. Primary ferment temp is 63 F.
 
I don't have my notes with me, but mine finished somewhere around 1.030 too. However, I started with an O.G. of 1.11. I used WLP 001 and that is right at the low range of it's attenuation. Your attenuation seems a little low for 1084. What temp did you mash at? How long has it been in primary?
 
I don't have my notes with me, but mine finished somewhere around 1.030 too. However, I started with an O.G. of 1.11. I used WLP 001 and that is right at the low range of it's attenuation. Your attenuation seems a little low for 1084. What temp did you mash at? How long has it been in primary?

Yeah I was hoping for 75% attenuation with the 1084 which would put me at 1.022 F.G.

I mashed at 154, it's been in the primary for 8 days now. I made a healthy starter, pumped O2 in the wort and lag time was about 6 hours.

I'll take another reading in 2 days.
 
Yeah, it seems that you should be able to get lower. I've never used 1084 myself so I don't know how flocculant it is, but you could try rousing the yeast.

A little more time may help too. I remember mine took a couple weeks to fully attenuate.

Cheers
 
Yeah, it seems that you should be able to get lower. I've never used 1084 myself so I don't know how flocculant it is, but you could try rousing the yeast.

A little more time may help too. I remember mine took a couple weeks to fully attenuate.

Cheers


After 2 weeks it is holding at 1.027 I guess I'm fine with that. Off to the secondary!!
 
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