jeffz
Active Member
I had what I thought might be a uniquely bright idea: to try the oat-steeping technique Igliashon used in his No-Nonsense Oatmeal Stout as part of a GF IPA recipe, as a way to improve smoothness/mouthfeel. (It ends up adding oats to IPAs is nothing new as I could have seen if I searched for the concept first).
On to my questions: this was my first time attempting to toast and steep oats in a brew. I used Bob's Red Mill quick cooking oats. I tried moistening a pound, spread them on a baking sheet, baked them at 350F for an hour, and inadvertently made something that looks like a sheet of acoustic ceiling tile. I had stirred up to a point but then gave up as it solidified. Too much water? Next time I sprinkled only a bit of water into the oats, and got a better result after an hour in the oven: crispy, slightly darkened oats, with a few clumps I could easily break apart with my fingers. But really they didn't darken much at all. I still pulled them out for fear of suddenly burning them, but perhaps should have gone a bit longer to get more color.
When it came time to steep, I made what I think were a series of missteps. I combined the oats (1lb) and some crystal malt quinoa I made a few weeks ago (1lb) together in a small strainer bag I use for partial-mash type brewing and set them steeping in 1 gallon of water.
First disaster: my strainer bag broke. I think a tiny hole burned to the bottom of my kettle and then the bag quickly gave up the ghost. I lifted it a bit to give it a stir and boom. That led me, after my 30-minute steep at 150F, to improvise a series of other pots/strainers to attempt to filter the oats and quinoa out of my wort. In the course of fumbling with all this, I found there was really no water left over at all. I had really just succeeded in making a big ball of gluey paste.
I let the glue sit for a bit while I hit the web and found that perhaps I had simply used way too little water. Being this was a 4-gallon recipe I was aiming for, I heated another gallon up to around 170 (thinking to do something like a mash-out with it) and dumped the glued up oatmeal ball back in, stirring to break it back up. Then I ran this back through a series of strainers to try and extract all the liquid I could.
My end resulting wort, even with the addition of my other ingredients (sorghum extract and rice syrup) was much lighter in color (maybe 5SRM where I was aiming for 9) and gravity (1.052 instead of 1.070) than I was hoping for.
I bet I can chalk the gravity loss up to my fumbling about with the oats, but what about the color? My theory is that the oats might have actually eaten the color from my crystal instead of it making it into the wort. Possible? If so, next time I try a recipe like this I might instead do 2 separate mini-mashes and then combine the worts pre-boil? Another possibility is that I just didn't darken my cystal malt quinoa as much as I thought I had. To my eye it looked around 40L but I'm hardly an expert judge.
Let me know if you see any other obvious mistakes in what I described. I still decided to ferment this, even though it's probably going to be the weirdest unintentional session IPA ever. I'd been aiming for something like a super-strong take on Ithaca Flower Power IPA, and instead I think I'm going to get something like a creamy Boddington's with off-the-charts bitterness. We'll see!
Jeff
On to my questions: this was my first time attempting to toast and steep oats in a brew. I used Bob's Red Mill quick cooking oats. I tried moistening a pound, spread them on a baking sheet, baked them at 350F for an hour, and inadvertently made something that looks like a sheet of acoustic ceiling tile. I had stirred up to a point but then gave up as it solidified. Too much water? Next time I sprinkled only a bit of water into the oats, and got a better result after an hour in the oven: crispy, slightly darkened oats, with a few clumps I could easily break apart with my fingers. But really they didn't darken much at all. I still pulled them out for fear of suddenly burning them, but perhaps should have gone a bit longer to get more color.
When it came time to steep, I made what I think were a series of missteps. I combined the oats (1lb) and some crystal malt quinoa I made a few weeks ago (1lb) together in a small strainer bag I use for partial-mash type brewing and set them steeping in 1 gallon of water.
First disaster: my strainer bag broke. I think a tiny hole burned to the bottom of my kettle and then the bag quickly gave up the ghost. I lifted it a bit to give it a stir and boom. That led me, after my 30-minute steep at 150F, to improvise a series of other pots/strainers to attempt to filter the oats and quinoa out of my wort. In the course of fumbling with all this, I found there was really no water left over at all. I had really just succeeded in making a big ball of gluey paste.
I let the glue sit for a bit while I hit the web and found that perhaps I had simply used way too little water. Being this was a 4-gallon recipe I was aiming for, I heated another gallon up to around 170 (thinking to do something like a mash-out with it) and dumped the glued up oatmeal ball back in, stirring to break it back up. Then I ran this back through a series of strainers to try and extract all the liquid I could.
My end resulting wort, even with the addition of my other ingredients (sorghum extract and rice syrup) was much lighter in color (maybe 5SRM where I was aiming for 9) and gravity (1.052 instead of 1.070) than I was hoping for.
I bet I can chalk the gravity loss up to my fumbling about with the oats, but what about the color? My theory is that the oats might have actually eaten the color from my crystal instead of it making it into the wort. Possible? If so, next time I try a recipe like this I might instead do 2 separate mini-mashes and then combine the worts pre-boil? Another possibility is that I just didn't darken my cystal malt quinoa as much as I thought I had. To my eye it looked around 40L but I'm hardly an expert judge.
Let me know if you see any other obvious mistakes in what I described. I still decided to ferment this, even though it's probably going to be the weirdest unintentional session IPA ever. I'd been aiming for something like a super-strong take on Ithaca Flower Power IPA, and instead I think I'm going to get something like a creamy Boddington's with off-the-charts bitterness. We'll see!
Jeff
