Sweet Potato Stout

I've had some questions about a sweet potato stout, but couldn't find many answers so I decided to try it out. The recipe is as follows:

6lb Amber LME
2lb Dark DME
3lb Black Roasted Barley
1.5lb Chocolate Malt
1.5lb Special B
05lb Flaked Barley
0.5lb Black Patent
6.75lb fresh sweet potatoes
Wyeast 3787
1oz Challenger (60min)
0.25oz Cascade (60min)
1oz Cascade (30min)
1oz Cascade (30min)
1lb dark brown sugar

For this I made a 3L starter.

I sliced the potatoes in a food processor then baked them at 400 for about an hour, until they started to brown/blacken. Then I smashed them up and mixed them with 2oz amylase enzyme for about 3 hours, keeping them at around 140F.

I did the partial mash with the grains and potatoes for 1 hour at 150F in 2.5gal water, then sparged with 2gal water that was at 200F. Then I brought to a boil, added the extract, hops, etc. Then topped off with 2.5gal, bringing the final batch size to 5.3gal.

My OG, however, was 1.075 after everything. I funneled everything into my carboy, so it should have mixed the wort with the topoff water good enough. I took a sample with an autosiphon. This just seems like a low OG (Beersmith says 1.096).

I'm curious about the OG, and also if anyone has any comments on my process (2nd partial mash batch) or my recipe.

Anyway, it should taste pretty good, the final mixture had a very suttle sweet potato taste, but was kinda overpowered by the brown sugar which I'm assuming will mellow out over time.

Thanks for the input!

I'm not sure, but I find I'm usually disappointed by 'exotic' recipes with lots of unusual crap in them. I find it takes a lot of work to find a balance that works well with these sorts of beers - my pumpkin ale has been a work in progress for several years now.

In a beer with this many bold flavours - 1/2lb Black Patent, 3(!) lbs black roast, 1.5lb (!) Special B - there are certainly a lot of very powerful flavours at play here, and I'm not sure if the comparitively subtle contributions from the potatoes will be noticeable. With spuds, most of the weight is water. It's at least 80% of the overall weight, so 6.75lbs of sweet potatoes is really more like 1.25 to 1.5lbs of dry starch material - so it's not really a major player among all those intense specialty grains.

Lazy Magnolia, a craft brewer out of Kiln, Mississippi not too far from me brews a sweet potato stout that's one of the best I've tasted. Sweet potatoes aren't dominant in taste, and I haven't the slightest clue about about your recipe, but good luck with your stout! Hope it turns out well!

goggledone said:

Lazy Magnolia

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I'm from Ocean Springs, so I'm quite familiar with Jefferson Stout. It was actually what made me want to do the sweet potato stout. I just wanted it to be higher in alcohol since theirs is something like 4.5% (****ing MS laws).

I'm not sure about their recipe, but I know they use canned sweet potatoes. I was hoping the fresh ones would impart more flavor. Guess I'll find out in a month of so!

Certainly a great stout! We're just starting to get it on shelves over here in Mobile. I wish I had the experience to help you figure out your gravity conundrum, but I simply don't. Good luck with Raise your Pints. Free the Hops took time, but worked out (completely bucking any Alabama-centric political science theorist's beliefs). Cheers!