Next up oatmeal stout

Here is my next batch due to brew this Sunday. It's an oatmeal stout recipe from my LHBS. I'll be working with them when I pick up the kit to adjust it for a higher ABV.

7 lb. John Bull Amber Malt Extract
1 lb. M & F Amber Dry Malt
½ lb. M & F Roasted Barley Malt 675° L
½ lb. M & F Black Patent Malt 471° L
½ lb. M & F Chocolate Malt 338° L
1 lb. Flaked Oats (Quaker Quick Oats Can Be Substituted)
1oz. Yakima Magnum Hops (Bittering)
1 oz. Fuggles Hops (Finishing)
Wyeast # 1099XL Whitbread Ale Yeast






Any thoughts?

Thanks

Tommy

How do you incorporate the Quaker oats wihout cooking them into oatmeal? Are they steeped like specialty grains?

Oats are steepd or mashed with the other grains. You'll end up with a nice pile of mush in your grain bag, but they make a nice smooth beer

Well, the day has arrived. I'll be brewing in a couple of hours but something just struck me. The recipe above is from my LHBS. It calls for 1.5 gal of water and I think all of their recipes may be the same. I know the last 2 that I did were.
Does this seem low?
I thought my last two brews, which came out good, were a little light as far as alcohol goes. My OG on my last brew (a Hop devil Clone) was 1.046 and my FG came in at 1.014.
Could it be that after the boil with so little water, then evaporation etc, then having to add about 4 gals of top off water, it's getting diluted?

Tommy

Absolute beginner answer here but wouldn't the oats soak up a lot of the water that would usually be left in the wort?

Yes, you have to add more water to compensate when mashing.

beer4breakfast said:

Yes, you have to add more water to compensate when mashing.

Click to expand...

What does that mean? Water to the kettle? Water to the top off? It doesn't matter at this point, as I stated in my post I only had a couple of hrs till brew time. I got no response so I went ahead. I added more water to my kettle and upped it to 2 gals. This is my third batch and I have to say batch # 2 went a whole lot smoother. The finished wort was like syrup. Everytime I tried to get a temp reading my thermometer was gunked up with thick wort.
I finally got it into the fermenter but even after using top off water to swish in my kettle trying to get all the wort out I still couldn't get it all. It was kind of like pouring extract from the can.

Well it's in the fermenter and now the wait.

My LHBS said that with the Oatmeal stout you want a concentrated wort thus the minimal water. Even though I added more water that bad boy was "thick."

About a hundred other things went wrong also.

I forgot to remove my bittering hops as well as my flavoring hops. When it got stuck in the funnel I remembered So I ended up cooling my wort with the hop bags in there.

It would have been nice to get a reply before I started brewing. Actually it would have been nice to get a reply at all really.

Now it's wait and see.


Tommy

Adding more water... I meant to the kettle, but it doesn't really matter as long as you end up with the right volume at the end.

All grains absorb a certain amount of water. Charlie Papazian says in his book that each pound of grain retains about 1/10th gallon of water (380ml). This is true whether you are steeping or mashing. I don't know if oats would be typical or not in that respect. Seems like they might hold more water than other grains, but I don't really know. Also, boiling evaporates 1/2 to a gallon of water per hour, dep;ending on how vigorous the boil.

I can imagine you had a very concentrated wort if you used 1.5 gallons of water for the boil. If you're doing this inside on the range with a 16 to 20 quart pot, I'd shoot for 2.5 to 3 gallons of wort. 3.5 gallons in a 20 quart pot.

beer4breakfast said:

Adding more water... I meant to the kettle, but it doesn't really matter as long as you end up with the right volume at the end.

All grains absorb a certain amount of water. Charlie Papazian says in his book that each pound of grain retains about 1/10th gallon of water (380ml). This is true whether you are steeping or mashing. I don't know if oats would be typical or not in that respect. Seems like they might hold more water than other grains, but I don't really know. Also, boiling evaporates 1/2 to a gallon of water per hour, dep;ending on how vigorous the boil.

I can imagine you had a very concentrated wort if you used 1.5 gallons of water for the boil. If you're doing this inside on the range with a 16 to 20 quart pot, I'd shoot for 2.5 to 3 gallons of wort. 3.5 gallons in a 20 quart pot.

Click to expand...

I ended up using 2 gals of water in a 20qt kettle. It was thick!

My OG was 1.062.

Tommy

I just have 5.5 gallons marked with a sharpie on my fermenting bucket. I boil however much water I decide to boil, usually 2-3 gallons, and then add ice cold water to the bucket up to the 5.5 gallon line. One nice thing about doing extracts...

Well, it took about 7 hours lag time to get my first bubble. That was at around 10:25 last night. This morning it's bubbling away. I want to say a bubble per second but I think it's even faster than that, maybe 2 bubbles. It looks like 2.5 to 3 inch krausen.

Time will tell if I screwed up on this one, for now all is well. I'm glad I went with the 2 gals of water rather than the 1.5 the recipe called for. It seems when all was said and done I had lost a full gal to evaporation and steeping.

I had about a 2.5 inch scorch on the bottom of the kettle even though I stirred fairly constantly. there was also some toasted looking grain at the bottom of my "tea" pot. I thought it was burnt on until I wiped it, it may just have been sediment. It smelled like burnt toast though and looked like coffee grains.

I have a question about boils. I may be misunderstanding the term "rolling boil."
I'm interpreting this as vigorous and so I turn the heat up way high. I'm talking "rolling!" My stove is a piece of crap so it's hard to control (electric and old). Can it be too high? I stir a lot.
But it's rolling like waves!


Tommy

Brewno said:

I had about a 2.5 inch scorch on the bottom of the kettle even though I stirred fairly constantly. there was also some toasted looking grain at the bottom of my "tea" pot. I thought it was burnt on until I wiped it, it may just have been sediment. It smelled like burnt toast though and looked like coffee grains.

I have a question about boils. I may be misunderstanding the term "rolling boil."
I'm interpreting this as vigorous and so I turn the heat up way high. I'm talking "rolling!" My stove is a piece of crap so it's hard to control (electric and old). Can it be too high? I stir a lot.
But it's rolling like waves!


Tommy

Click to expand...

After reading your other post on the now infamous "Gravity & Sweetness", I looked into this one.

I learned the hard way when I was getting used to my keggle. You need alot of BTU's to get to the boil, but once you reach it, you can safely turn the heat down and still keep the boil. (that's the learning part as I could not easily judge where to keep the heat with such a large volume) I had a huge scorch on the bottom of the keggle and my wort came out a chocolate brown instead of a light brown. The good part is that it only burned a small portion so the taste coming out of the boil was not horrible, just bitter like a burnt chocolate chip cookie. Since I like burnt chocolate chip cookies, I think I'll enjoy this one. Someone else told me that if you let the brew age longer the scorched taste will "mostly" dissipate and I found that when I went to 2ndary, that it was a bit less than when I first tested. I plan on leaving in 2ndary for at least 3-4 weeks before going to bottle.

You mentioned burnt grains on the bottom, are you boiling the grains with your wort or was this just escapees from a muslin bag?

Hopfan said:

You mentioned burnt grains on the bottom, are you boiling the grains with your wort or was this just escapees from a muslin bag?

Click to expand...

It wasn't the wort, it was my steep pot. I think it was just escapees since it wiped right off. It was more like coffee grains.

EDIT:
Yes, you're right I also had a small scorch spot on the bottom of my brew kettle, I don't know what that was from. Just a small spot.

Tommy