Irish Stout Irish Coffee

Just a simple dry Irish stout recipe with heaps of coffee added. The absence of caramel malts really helps the coffee shine and the flaked barley lends just enough creaminess to give it a bit of body.

This beer is really all about the coffee so don't skimp. No Folger's, and nothing too dark or it tends to take on an ashy flavor. Whenever I brew I always try to look for a nice medium roast with toffee and caramel notes. This guy pours with a fluffy, off-white head that won't quit. The aroma is all coffee, as is the flavor with a subtle hop bitterness and slight fruitiness from the yeast. Drinks a lot like a cold-brewed coffee until you start to catch a buzz.

Grains:

9.00lb 2-Row Pale
1.00lb Munich Malt
0.75lb Chocolate Malt
0.50lb Roasted Barley
0.50lb Flaked Barley

Hops (Amount, Type, AA%, Boil Time):

1oz Willamette 3.9% (60min.)
1oz Fuggles 5.1% (40min.)

Irish Moss (15min.)

Yeast:

WLP004 Irish Ale

Other things:

1/3lb Coarse ground coffee (added at bottling/kegging)

Mash grains low and slow, 151ºF for 75 minutes. After your 60 minute boil, cool to 68º and pitch yeast. Ferment for 7 days then rack to secondary and let sit for at least 7 days, or until fermentation has been completed, but no less.

Sanitize a container that can hold about a liter of liquid, fill with 20oz of water, add coffee and cover with sanitized plastic wrap. Ideally you want to grind the coffee fresh then let it steep in 20oz of cold spring water for 24 hours before adding directly to your bottling bucket or keg. In the past I have racked the beer onto the coffee when transferring to secondary and let sit for a week until the coffee grinds flocc out. This method produces similar results, however it creates one ungodly mess, and I can't guarantee you won't have some coffee grinds floating around in your finished beer. What I'm trying to say is, don't be lazy, sanitize the extra container and you will be rewarded with less clean-up and beer free of coffee shards (which is all we home brewers ever want).

Anyway, in case my words didn't come across as eloquently as I hoped, here is a picture. If you do decide to brew, please touch base and let me know how it turned out. Cheers!

Leathernose,

I just threw a batch of your coffee stout into a fermenter tonight! I tried my best to follow your recipe but I wound up with a post-boil OG of 1.06... The wort smells amazing and I cannot wait to add a bit of Pete's Coffee before kegging. Fermentation temperature is around 67 degrees.

Some possibilities for the higher OG-

I'm using an Igloo cooler for a mash tun and I typically have a bunch of trouble measuring temperature. I have a temperature gauge on the side, however it's around 25 degrees too low (I believe). I used a submersible thermometer to measure the temperature of the mash and it read around 157 degrees. This could have been a little too high however. Regardless, I let the mash cool around 6 degrees and added a small amount of boiling water in the last 15 minutes. Who knows what temperature I averaged, however it should have been around 153 degrees or so.

Sparging ended up lasting around 75 minutes. I can't seem to set the valves on my electric hot liquor tank and mash tun perfectly.

I also settled on 6.25 gallons pre-boil. A boil took the volume down to 5.5 gallons and finally 5.25 gallons after transfer to fermenter.

How often do you hit 1.056 exactly? Do you have any suggestions for dealing with the higher OG? I'm fairly new to all grain and am working on my process. Thanks!

Thanks again for posting this recipe. It's exciting to see a simple, high quality coffee stout without 99+ specialty additions.

techbiker said:

Leathernose,

I just threw a batch of your coffee stout into a fermenter tonight! I tried my best to follow your recipe but I wound up with a post-boil OG of 1.06... The wort smells amazing and I cannot wait to add a bit of Pete's Coffee before kegging. Fermentation temperature is around 67 degrees.

Some possibilities for the higher OG-

I'm using an Igloo cooler for a mash tun and I typically have a bunch of trouble measuring temperature. I have a temperature gauge on the side, however it's around 25 degrees too low (I believe). I used a submersible thermometer to measure the temperature of the mash and it read around 157 degrees. This could have been a little too high however. Regardless, I let the mash cool around 6 degrees and added a small amount of boiling water in the last 15 minutes. Who knows what temperature I averaged, however it should have been around 153 degrees or so.

Sparging ended up lasting around 75 minutes. I can't seem to set the valves on my electric hot liquor tank and mash tun perfectly.

I also settled on 6.25 gallons pre-boil. A boil took the volume down to 5.5 gallons and finally 5.25 gallons after transfer to fermenter.

How often do you hit 1.056 exactly? Do you have any suggestions for dealing with the higher OG? I'm fairly new to all grain and am working on my process. Thanks!

Thanks again for posting this recipe. It's exciting to see a simple, high quality coffee stout without 99+ specialty additions.

Click to expand...

Sorry Tech,
I haven't brewed in a while so I haven't been on the forum. It's probably of no use to you now, but the least I could do is give you the courtesy of responding.

I've brewed this beer 4 or 5 times and usually hit somewhere between 1.056 and 1.058. However, I don't think a few extra points should be any cause for concern. A little extra alcohol is always better than less
The yeast should have no problem chewing that down close enough to the final gravity, especially without any caramel malts in the mash. This of course, is also dependent on your mash temperature. (I would be interested in hearing what you FG was, as that may shed some light on whether your mash temp came in high or low)

As far as the cause, could be slight variations in post-boil volume, either on my end or yours. Maybe the higher mash temperature yielded slightly higher conversion of sugars? don't quote me on that. Or maybe you're just a better stirrer than I and got better efficiency.
In any case, I hope it turned out well for you. Thanks for brewing

Hi Leathernose,

It's always good to get an update, especially from the recipe designer himself!

Here are my gravities:

OG: 1.060
Gravity at 3 weeks (before secondary): 1.022
FG taken yesterday: 1.012

There was a good size yeast cake at the bottom of my secondary. Apparently the yeast were still chewing away for a few weeks. I got so much yeast activity in the primary that wort/beer blew out of the airlock and all over the closet.

I wasn't entirely sure how to steep the coffee so I put the specified amount in a fine mesh bag and placed in 20oz of cool water. I used some fresh medium Tara coffee but ended up steeping for half a day too long. This is definitely a good way to keep most of the grounds out of the beer.

I followed the force carb guide in the forum and took a sample today. Great mouth feel! It's almost like drinking a nitro beer even though I'm only using CO2. You're right on the mark in your description. Flavor is all coffee. I think this is going to be a hit. My brother tried a sample and he thought it was great even though he hates coffee. haha

You're right. I may have mashed at too high a temperature. Who knows how much this affected the final flavor though. Maybe my long sparging process increased the gravity too? All I know for sure is that it's a great beer. Thanks again for the recipe!

Thinking this will be my next beer, planning on doing it up next weekend