Brown Sugar - Chocolate Stout Question

[brewtus-maximus]

So I want to brew my first stout. I have had a few known problems with my last few brews that lead to a pretty weak beer. Long story short, I want to build a good strong stout with body out the wazzou (SP?).

Here is the plan...

Steeping grains:
1 lbs Pale Chocolate
1 lbs Crystal 60
1 lbs Black Patent

Extract:
9 lbs of Dark DME

Hops:
1 oz Northern Brewer (60 Min)
1 oz Fuggles (10 Min)

Additions:
2 lbs Brown Sugar

Here is my question... 2 pounds of Brown Sugar is A LOT (at least from what I have read). I hope that I have off set that with the 3 pounds of Steeping grains. I want the extra ABV and the molasses flavor from the sugar but I am afraid that I will lose my body to this. Brew pal says it will finish at 1.017 which seems like plenty for me but... Is two pounds of Brown Sugar too much?

 

[blackbeer]

idk but i'm think that 1 lb of bp is gonna make for a really bitter brew

 

[frazier]

If you want body in your beer, skip the sugar. It will just thin it out. Use more DME if you feel you must.

My stout uses a pound of roast barley, and 2 pounds of flaked barley. The flaked needs mashing though, so it may not fit your methods.

Cheers!

 

[fimpster]

That's a lot of black patent.

 

[brewtus-maximus]

How much will it thin the beer though? 1017 seems ok to me.

And Blackbeer, I was unaware that BP would bitter my beer. Like I said, first stout. How much do you recommend?

 

[Yooper]

I'm not crazy about your recipe. One issue is the dark DME- it already has crystal malt in it and other things, but I have no idea how much or what kind. By adding a pound of 60L (generally great in stout!), you may be doubling up on the crystal malt, or not. I'd go with light DME and get the color and flavor from the grains.

I'm not a huge fan of a pound of black patent. It can be quite acrid. I'd go with roasted barley or black barley, and less of it.

I'd not use brown sugar. I understand about wanting molasses flavor, but once molasses ferments out and the sweetness is gone it doesn't taste the same. If it's really a molasses flavor you want, though, why not use molasses? Both taste really awful to me when fermented, but some people like it.

I'd add flaked barley to your grains, if you want body and a rocky head and leave out any simple sugars like brown sugar and molasses.

 

[OneImpBrewery]

Edit: A wild Yooper Appeared. Above advice is Gold. Also Yoopers Oatmeal Stout turned out amazing.

I use 1 pound in one of my brown hoppy beers and the taste is minimal. If you want molasses why not add molasses? Here is a post of someone else working on what you are thinking.

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=8957.0

-Imp

PS - To repeat the echo in here. That's to much black patent. 4 oz should be plenty.

 

[brewtus-maximus]

Ok... ok... I will definitely be throttling back the Black Patent and the Brown Sugar. How does the 4 oz of bp and 1 lbs of Brown Sugar sound?

 

[Calder]

How much will it thin the beer though? 1017 seems ok to me.

And Blackbeer, I was unaware that BP would bitter my beer. Like I said, first stout. How much do you recommend?

Don't put any faith in the calculators for predicting FG. I would bet that if you added 2 more lbs of sugar to the basic recipe, the calculated FG would go up ..... whereas in actuality it will go down, because sugar ferments out completely.

With your recipe, I think you would be very lucky to end up at 1.017. I think you will be closer to 1.025, even with the sugar. The 3 lbs of steeping grains will give you .010 of unfermentable sugars, before you add the extract. Who knows how fermentable that extract is. It is made up of:
- 54% Munich
- 30% Base Malt
- 13% Crystal 60
- 3% Black Malt

Using 9 lbs of Dark LME with no steeping grains; by my calculations, you already have the equivalent of 1.5 lbs of C60 and 6 ozs of black malt.

 

[biggmatt]

Don't forget to consider ABV. that pound of brown sugar will up it. With over 10 pounds of malt that could be 9% to 12% alcohol.

 

[blackbeer]

one thing that took me a LOT of batches to figure is that MORE does not equal BETTER. that goes for almost any of the ingredients in beer. figure out what you want out of a beer profile and build from there.

i haven't done an extract brew in 20 years but if i was doing a extract stout that i wanted some body and nice malt & hop flavor i'd do something like this:

8 lbs light DME
1/2 lb crushed roasted barley
1/2 lb crushed 60l crystal malt
magnum bittering hops
cascades, EKG or other flavoring hops

mix the dme and water and get it warming up and put the grains in a grain bag and steep them in a couple of quarts of 150-ish water while the dme is coming to a boil. if you are doing a full boil, pull out some of the dme/water when it is fully mixed and almost boiling and cool it as quick as you can a do a gravity reading. once its down around 70-ish you will have an accurate idea of your pre-boil gravity. if you are not doing a full boil, then there are calculators online but i have no idea if they are accurate or not. anyway, figure that with a 90 min stovetop boil you might gain 8-10 points of gravity and use this as your OG and find an online IBU calculator and punch in your OG, volume and proposed hopping schedule and adjust accordingly to get around 50-60 IBU. make sure some of those IBU's are coming from 15 minute additions for flavor.

do a 90 minute boil and start hopping 30 minutes in for your bittering and 75 in for flavor. when the boil is just about done, add in your specialty malt tea and cool/ferment.

for my taste buds, i don't like BP in stouts. i like RB and i like it steeped rather than mashed. the RB will give it a roast stout flavor and the crystal will give it a caramel malt flavor. i just did an AG batch like that at 1.070 and 57 IBU and tapped it the other day and it is excellent.

i never settle on my final hop schedule until i know what the pre-boil gravity and suspected OG will be. its a IBU russian roulette otherwise. especially with extract.

 

[brewtus-maximus]

So apparently I am a noob and an idiot. I don't even have Crystal 60. I have CaraAroma. So I am wondering what to make my recipe now...

What do you guys think about

1 lbs Pale Chocolate
8 oz CaraAroma
4 oz Black Patent

Extract:
9 lbs of Dark DME

Hops:
1 oz Northern Brewer (60 Min)
1 oz Fuggles (10 Min)

Additions:
1 lbs Brown Sugar


Do we think this is conservative enough or what? I have never used any of these ingredients so I have no clue.

 

[OneImpBrewery]

Not an idiot. Recipe building is hard. Most of us find a good recipe in the recipes section. Try it out and if we like it we repeat it with our own tweeks. What are you building your recipes with?

Also what yeast?

Check out www.brewtoad.com

It's free and I found it easy to work with. It gives you style guides to follow too

 

[Sir-Hops-A-Lot]

Unfortunately BREWTOAD is no longer free! Upgrade to Brewtoad Pro!
You are smart to plan your stout and you're getting feedback from some real pros.
May I suggest that you simplify your recipe? There are a lot of ingredients to muddy the waters on top of the dark extract with all it's components.
I have Terry Foster's Book, Brewing Stouts and Porters with a lot of recipes. One recipe involves using the dark extract with little or no extra steeping grains.
How about using your dark extract with a 1/4 pound of black or roasted malt?
Save the other malts for the next batch! By the way, 9# of dry extract makes a strong beer! A lot of recipes for 5 gallons use 6# of extract.

 

[brewtus-maximus]

Good points. I was starting to feel defeated because my last two beers finished much weaker than I had wanted, however, swinging the pendulum too far back the other way is not ideal either. So maybe conservative is the way to go. What do we say to 6 pounds of DME, the brown sugar, and then using the pale chocolate malt. I had wanted this to be a chocolate stout. I was good with it being "Extra" bordering on Imperial, but that's probably not wise with this being my first stout.

I plan on brewing in a few hours so any last minute suggestions are welcome!

Thanks!

 

[brewtus-maximus]

Getting ready to start. Water is working its way up to 150- 160 range and then I'll be steeping .5 lbs of Pale Chocolate and .25 lbs of Black Patent. Then I'll be adding 6 Lbs of dark DME and 1 oz of Northern brewer. 1 oz of Fuggles at 10 minutes along with a clearing aid.

We shall see...

 

[blackbeer]

a lb of chocolate might be a bit much. maybe half a lb. and i think you will end up with more of a porter vs a stout.

and i would just leave that sugar out. its just going to thin your beer. to get body you need unfermented malt sugars left at the end of your fermentation.

 

[brewtus-maximus]

So I'm all done for today. I ended with a nice even 1060 for my OG. I did however end up with about 6 gallons. This was my first full boil and I forgot to account for my sparge water so lesson learned there. I also had to boil for 90 minutes to try and get my volume down once I realized what I had done but that should have hurt anything. A 1060 OG is right about what I wanted so I guess my volume issue ended up in my favor?

Well see how this goes.

Also, I used Safe ale 05 btw.

 

[Sir-Hops-A-Lot]

More beer is always a good thing and 1.060 won't be weak.
I just did a chocolate milk stout. I used 4 oz of cocao nibs soaked in vodka for 3 days in the secondary. The chocolate taste is mild but around where I would like it; not overpowering.
It's great that you used lots of chocolate malt. I see porters that use a pound. I think that if you want the chocolate taste from the malts you actually need some black malt in there but I may be wrong. But now that you have it brewed you may want to consider splitting the batch and using cocao nibs in part of it. It would be a good learning experience which is what brewing is all about IMHO.

 

[brewtus-maximus]

We're all bottled up! FG landed at 1016 so right about where I wanted it. It tasted great too. It was fairly chocolatey but not overpowering and the BP came through just enough. It tastes almost like dark chocolate.

I passed on the nibs experiment. Id like to some time but I am really new at this so I really just wanted a good solid brew under my belt. But I'll definitely try it another time.

We'll see how the mouth feel is after it carbs but so far so good. Thanks for all of the feedback to all who offered. I could have made a really bad beer here and I think this will be one that I can actually show off thanks to you guys.

 

[fimpster]

Well done. Now comes the hardest part of brewing.... waiting to drink it!