First Attempt at a Milk Stout. Need Recipe Help.

[JCasey1992]

HI guys!

Any thoughts on this recipe? It is my first attempt at a milk stout as well as my first time using Blackprinz so I'm a little unsure of myself.

Thanks for the feedback!

Cheers!
Casey

 

[Kent88]

Don't know how helpful this will be, but here is a stout recipe I've made that calls for debittered black malt / blackprinz: Here

 

[Sadu]

I'm not familiar with that yeast, but everything looks in the right ball park to me.

8% lactose is great.
10% roasted malts is great, and the debittered black prinze will be less harsh than all roast barley.
10% crystal is a personal preference thing. I'd cap it at around 6-8% myself but this is fine too.

I'd personally add in some unmalted adjuncts like flaked barley or flaked oats, maybe 6%, because they always work well in stouts. And I'd increase the bitterness a little, I think this is necessary to balance out the sweetness.

 

[JCasey1992]

Thanks guys! Great help so far! I just realized that I actually don't have any of the Whitbread ale yeast anymore. Rather, I have some Wyeast 1335 British Ale II (http://www.wyeastlab.com/yeast-strain/british-ale-ii). Would this work in a milk stout? Once again, thanks for the help!

 

[JCasey1992]

I also have some Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale if that's any better.

 

[Queequeg]

IMO 0.6lb of crystal 120 is too much. I would dial it back to 0.25lb and up the crystal 40 to a full lb.

Also you may want to add either flaked barley or oats at a high percentage. Flaked barley would be my preference as you tend to get a more creamy flavor at a lower % than oats one.

For the yeast you really want a high ester producing strain, it will really enhance the sweet milk chocolate qualities.

Make sure you mash so your FG is high, a good FG for this type of stout is around 20-25 SG.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Any thoughts on this recipe? It is my first attempt at a milk stout as well as my first time using Blackprinz so I'm a little unsure of myself.

HBT regulars will know that the first thing I'm going to say is cut down on the crystal, or at the very least balance it out with sugar. Brewers outside the UK seem obsessed with the stuff. Milk stout is one of the rare styles that can be traced to a single brewery, so a good place to start would be an early Mackeson recipe before Whitbread messed around with it too much. You'll note that Mackeson used no crystal at all, in fact they broadly replaced all your crystal with invert and cane sugar (golden syrup would be an ideal substitute), and used more brown malt rather than your roast barley (and upped the chocolate). Even back then Mackeson was only 4.5%, it's drifted lower through the years and now is just 2.8% (which rather makes a nonsense of the BJCP spec) - in Britain this is a low-alcohol style, it was intended for women and invalids.

Yeastwise, you want something with character and low attenuation, which rules out the 1084. The 1335 would do, but I'd save it for classic British ales (or use and repitch) if you're likely to be doing one in the near future as it's one of the better options for them.

 

[Queequeg]

Mackeson's is crap though. If your brewing an historic recipe then fair enough otherwise.....

At good starting point imo is left hand milk stout. That's a pretty good milk stout.

I really don't see the point of using lactose and sugar in the same recipe, pretty much cancel each other out.

I also don't really like lactose in most beers, but is mandatory in a milk stout.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Hence why I pointed to the 1936 version, which looks a pretty nice recipe. You can't just ignore the history. Apparently the US-brewed one is significantly worse than the British one, even though the latter has suffered enough over the years.

Lactose isn't the opposite of invert, not least because invert is only 90% actual sugar, there's all sorts of flavours going on there.

 

[Soulshine2]

"At good starting point imo is left hand milk stout. That's a pretty good milk stout."
I love left hand Milk Stout . Is there a clone recipe?

 

[myndflyte]

"At good starting point imo is left hand milk stout. That's a pretty good milk stout."
I love left hand Milk Stout . Is there a clone recipe?

Yes. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/left-hand-milk-stout-clone.139820/

 

[Queequeg]

Hence why I pointed to the 1936 version, which looks a pretty nice recipe. You can't just ignore the history. Apparently the US-brewed one is significantly worse than the British one, even though the latter has suffered enough over the years.

Lactose isn't the opposite of invert, not least because invert is only 90% actual sugar, there's all sorts of flavours going on there.

Yeah the invert I can see lending other qualities, and lactose has a milky thing going on, but straight up sugar is just going to dry the beer. Normally lactose is used to create a high FG so I don't see the point on using a table sugar addition to undo the reason for using lactose in the first place. Lactose doesn't significantly sweeten a beer ime either.

The copious use of brown and chocolate malt, is a great idea, that indeed looks intresting. But that recipe uses 0.05lb of oats. Surely that must be a typo, otherwise its 9g roughly. That not going to do anything.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Drying the beer is not a bad thing... (and people seem to think that British beers are generally sweeter than they actually are) Even if I was saying just use lactose and sucrose (which I wasn't), then it would still create a different balance to the dextrins in DME or whatever.

As for the oats, back then it was regarded as necessary yeast food when using dark malts in stouts. Since there's only a little bit of black malt, there's even less oats. You don't see the oats at all in post-war versions of Mackeson, so you can drop them.

[oh, and 1/20lb of oats is 22.7g. Still not much, but makes sense if they were adding it as a nutrient rather than as a proper component of the grist.]

 

[Queequeg]

I see, that's a really strange solution to yeast nutrition as oats are not significantly more nutrient dense than malted barley. You think they would use yeast in the boil, Anyway..

I'm not suggesting drying a beer is bad. I am British myself and so am pretty familiar with UK styles. My point is why do sugar to dry a beer when you are adding lactose to raise FG, unless the sugar is adding flavor when you can simply adjust the mash temperature or yeast selection.

I know you are not proposing this yourself, but that original Mackesons recipe does contain cane sugar. I get that this will yield a slightly different ratio of Dextrins in the final beer, but I think you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between that an a beer mashed lower. I'm also not saying this approach doesn't make a good beer just that it is logically inconsistent, in the same way that you point out using oats and or adjuncts when yeast selection can provide the fullness and body you are after.