My bourbon RIS finally comes to age

After 15 months of bottle conditioning my Oaked Bourbon Russian Imperial Stout is finally ready for consumption. It's been a long 15 months but well worth the wait. The only thing I would have done differently was wait longer to try and taste it. After splitting the batch and my trial bottles I'm only left with 12 to sit back and enjoy.

baseballstar4 said:

After 15 months of bottle conditioning my Oaked Bourbon Russian Imperial Stout is finally ready for consumption. It's been a long 15 months but well worth the wait. The only thing I would have done differently was wait longer to try and taste it. After splitting the batch and my trial bottles I'm only left with 12 to sit back and enjoy.

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Sounds like you should enjoy one a month and enjoy it the rest of the year. That last bottle should be fantastic.

That sounds like a good plan. Next time I brew this I know to let it sit and not even try it for a good amount of time.

I've been interested in brewing a bourbon RIS to drink next fall. Would you mind posting your recipe?

Quadrupled said:

I've been interested in brewing a bourbon RIS to drink next fall. Would you mind posting your recipe?

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Sure I'll do it once I get to my brew notes. It's an extract with specialty grains and I basically just got lucky with the recipe. I'd be happy to share it and take any pointers to improve it from anyone else that would like to chime in.

Quad - I came up with this recipe and just kind of threw everything but the kitchen sink at it. It was made before I really got into researching my recipes and coming up with a good formula for why I put things in it.

1# Chocolate Malt
1# Dark Crystal
1/2# Oats
1/2# Roasted Barley (All of these specialty steeped @ 160F for 30 min)
9.9# Gold LME
1# Dark DME
1# Brown Sugar
12 oz Blackstrap Molases @15 min
8 oz Maltodextrine @ 15min (probably could omit this)
2oz Simcoe 12.2% AA
1 oz Kent Goldings 4.8% AA
1oz Hallertau 3.8% AA
All these hops were pellets which I crushed and added together, then add 2 TBSPN to the boil every 5 minutes ( was doing a pseudo continuous hop addition)
Scottish Ale Yeast
I baked 3oz of light oak chips @300F for 30 min and soaked them in Woodford Reserve Bourbon for 3 weeks
The chips were added to secondary for 2 weeks
Transfered to tertiary, added 1 oz of bourbon let it sit for 6 months.
Then bottled and aged.

When I do this again I will leave the Malto out, I don't think that I really need this and may play with different and more hops.

Thanks for posting! I've been trying to amass different bourbon/oaked stouts and porters. Ideally I'd be able to very closely replicate Goose Island's Bourbon County Stout, but I'll certainly enjoy making the various recipes HBT members have deemed a winner.

What was your OG and FG?

Quadrupled said:

Thanks for posting! I've been trying to amass different bourbon/oaked stouts and porters. Ideally I'd be able to very closely replicate Goose Island's Bourbon County Stout, but I'll certainly enjoy making the various recipes HBT members have deemed a winner.

What was your OG and FG?

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Og: 1.090
Fg: 1.024

Do a search for Double W imperial stout. Brewing this next week.

Only thing I'd change would be to use regular molasses as blackstrap tends to leave a metallic flavor. Also, I'd add a lb of flaked barley to the grain bill.

boostsr20 said:

Only thing I'd change would be to use regular molasses as blackstrap tends to leave a metallic flavor. Also, I'd add a lb of flaked barley to the grain bill.

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Why the flaked barley?

baseballstar4 said:

Why the flaked barley?

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Creamy body and mouthfeel. I prefer it to malto dextrin. Usually use 15% between that and oats in my dark full body beers.