American Stout Crocker's NY Stout

[SMPress]

Recipe Type

All Grain

Yeast

WLP001 California Ale Yeast

Yeast Starter

Yes

Batch Size (Gallons)

11

Original Gravity

1.068

Final Gravity

1.017

Boiling Time (Minutes)

60

IBU

64.3

Color

40.5

Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp)

6 days @ 64, 2 days @ 66

Tasting Notes

.

23 pounds US 2-Row Pale

1.5 pounds Black Barley

1 pound Flaked Barley

15 ounces Crystal 40

8 ounces Chocolate

8 ounces Pale Chocolate

1.8 ounces @ 60 min 14% US Columbus

1.4 ounces @ 30 min 14% US Columbus

1 ounce @ 10 min 14% US Columbus

1.47 ounces @ 0 min 14% US Columbus


Starting with RO water add 3 grams Gypsum, 1 gram Baking Soda, 2.5 grams Calcium Chloride, 1 gram Pickling Lime to the Mash, and 2.3 grams Gypsum, 1.9 grams Calcium Chloride, 0.4 ml 85% Phosphorous Acid to the boil.

 

[SMPress]

This beer was named after a frat brother of a friend of mine. Crocker started a Hop Farm in upstate NY a few years back, and he sends us hops each year to brew with.

This batch was brewed with only his whole leaf hops. We had a few issues, as we left the hops loose in the boil, and ran into no end of troubles trying to get the wort out at the end of the boil, everything was getting stopped up with hop matter. I think that we ended up losing a lot of hop character on this beer, as it probably took us near an hour to empty the boil kettle, which means the late addition hops sat in hot wort for WAY longer than they should have.

I felt the hops were lacking, but that the beer was still pretty good. I entered the beer into 3 competitions, and didn't win anything, but came in 4th in the Stout category at 2 of the 3 comps. Overall not too bad. We are brewing again, and think we can win some medals with what we learned from the first outing...

The IBU's are a bit of a guess. As we are using fresh hops, we don't know what the actual Alpha levels are, they have never been to a lab, so I went with 14%, which was the default for Columbus in Beersmith.

 

[SMPress]

We decided to brew this beer again last weekend, been two years since we last made it. Just to screw things up and change enough variables that we won’t know exactly what makes this version better or worse than the other, we used the following:

Upped the Black Barley by a quarter pound
Replaced 15 ounces of Crystal 40 with 1 pound of Sacc 50 from Great Western (Samples from NHC)
Dropped the Maris by 5 pounds and replaced with 4.5 pounds of Briess 2-row (My sack of Maris ran low…)

For the flame out hops, I reduced the Columbus used by .4 ounces, and added a half ounce of Mt Hood. Back when we made the first batch, Crocker wasn’t growing Mt Hood, but now he is, and it smelled great. I almost considered replacing all the Columbus with Mt Hood, but figured it was good enough the first time that I didn’t want to do that.

We picked up some samples of Sacc 50 from NHC. Decided to give it a try. The guy at the BSG table said it was a good replacement for Crystal 40, which was already in the recipe. He claims that the Sacc malt allows the hops to shine through better than using a standard crystal. As we felt the hop character was a little subdued in the original batch, figured this might do the trick…

The extra Black Barley was just to ramp that character up slightly in this version.

We also decided to change the yeast. I was indeferent about the WLP001 in the first batch, and as stated a few times above, we had a bunch of NHC samples on hand, so decided to split the batch into 2 fermentations, one using BRY-97 American West Coast and the other using Nottingham, both Lallemand strains. Nottingham may be a little far afield for an American Stout, but what the hell, it may taste brilliant… Not sure that the West Coast will be much different than the CalAle, but time will tell.

We also upped the Mash temp to 156, wanted to get some more body into this one, hopefully it doesn't finish too sweet...

We also did a different water profile. I normally do my own water calculations, but since we had just been to NHC, we decided to use the Accumash packets we received there. They currently have 3 styles; we used the one for dark beer. I have no idea what is in there, or how it will turn out, but figured what the hell. Sadly, we changed so much that there may be a hard time pin pointing what changes are coming from where…

Currently both beers are still in the fermenter, will post again after getting to taste them.