Huge beer checklist.

Alright ive got a plan for my brother and sister in laws first family addition, BEER! Heres the plan, i want to make a BIG Oaked Russian Imperial Stout, like OG of 1.100+. Why do i want to make such a huge beer? Well i want to give my brother in law a 1ltr flip top bottle on the day of his/her birth and 5, 22oz bottles to be consumed each birthday until its 5th birthday. I want a huge beer so that it can be aged for this amount of time without going bad. I've done some research on the higher OG beers but i wanted to run it by the forum before i get this beast bubbling.

1. Huge yeast starter, 2000ml+ wyeast 1728 scottish ale
2. Aerated twice with pure o2, once before the pitch, and again after the primary fermentation has started. how long?
3. Extra yeast nutrients
4. Blow off tube.
5. Space to secondary for 3+ months

Now with a 10.5%+ beer will i need to re-pitch at bottling? Should i use as much as i used to ferment or will the amount in a regular smack pack work?
Is there anything that i am forgetting?

Your recipe and your brewing process

mrk305 said:

Your recipe and your brewing process

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Agreed.

All grain? DME to supplement?

Check your yeast amounts with Mr. Malty. The biggest beer I've done so far was a 1.095 and I used 3 packets of dry yeast. With a 2 liter starter, if you are only doing one round of a starter with one vial/pack of liquid yeast, it is probably WAY underpitching.

mrk305 said:

Your recipe and your brewing process

Click to expand...

Also agree.

You're also going to need a much larger starter than that.

And why O2 twice? Yeast will go into their anaerobic stage after the original oxygen is depleted and will start converting those sugars into alcohol, why add more?

I don't know much about that yeast strain, but Scottish/Scotch ales often have low attenuation, which might be a leave you with a really high FG in a beer that big. What is your mashing schedule, grain bill, etc.? I also agree that you will probably need a bigger starter, or better yet, repitch from the yeast cake of a lower gravity beer; maybe brew a mild, a dry stout, or a 60/- scottish ale if you are decided on that yeast and then repitch the cake from that. I just brewed a pale ale largely for the purpose of growing the yeast up for a barleywine.

@Braufguss - With really big beers it can be helpful to aerate maybe 12 hours into fermentation when the yeast are steadily reproducing; it can improve their cell wall integrity, which will be helpful later on in the fermentation when they need that healthy cell wall to protect them from the alcohol and low pH of the finished beer. Jamil and Palmer mentioned it during their series of high gravity Brewstrong episodes.

Also, to address bottling; I would recommend kraeusening because that way you know that you have active yeast when you start to carbonate. Check out braukaiser.com. Alternatively, you could use a yeast with a high alcohol tolerance; this could be a good place to employ the skills of champagne yeast.

http://hopville.com/recipe/624873/russian-imperial-stout-recipes/celebration-stout

Pretty much this in a nutshell. Might switch some stuff out here and there but OG, FG, and technique will be about the same. I could use Thames Valley 1275, it attenuates better and i just rinsed some from my brown ale i did. The only thing is Scottish has a higher alcohol tolerance.

Looks pretty good. I might suggest adding some rice hulls when mashing so that the oats don't gum it up too much. I would also mash relatively low, maybe 148-150 and let it go for 90 minutes; you'll need to convert the golden promise and oats as well as possible to compensate for the relatively high amounts of unfermentable sugars from the dark grains and extract. But my #1 piece of advice would be to repitch yeast from a previous batch so that you can ferment this monster. Definitely report back, I'll be interested to hear how it turns out.

I thought about using about 3% grain bill of rice hulls but never added it to the recipe. Anyways ill get a session beer going with the scottish and use the cake from that to ferment this one. Thanks for all the advice everyone!

The guy at white's labs said to oxygenate twice. Once before pitching and once again at 12 hours.