Let Them Eat Cake Stout (BA #100) - My first AG

[bjartur]

Now, of course I don't have the recipe on me but I wanted to start this thread nonetheless. Bear with me and I'll get that part up ASAP.

For now, the ingredients as I remember them were:
10 lbs Domestic 2 Row
1 lb flaked barley
.75 lb roasted barley
.25 lb chocolate row

.5 oz Target (?) hops, for which I substituted the Fuggle my LHBS had for the similar profile.

English Pale Ale Yeast (not sure of any more specifics)

1 sheet cake, baked, crumbled, boiled, simmered as slurry for 15 minutes, chilled and scrapped for fat.

Grain gets mashed for 60 at 154F and cake slurry goes into the mash before boil. Hops in for the full 60 min boil.
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After hitting up the LHBS, twice, for everything I needed, I realized that (1) I've never done an AG before, (2) I've never done a stout before, and (3) the ingredients list left off a recipe, so I appropriated an Irish Dry Stout recipe from here:

Dry Irish Stout
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.040 FG = 1.008
IBU = 35 SRM = ~38 ABV = 4.1%

Ingredients

7.5 lbs. (3.4 kg) 2-row pale malt (preferably Maris Otter)
12 oz. (0.34 kg) roasted barley (400–500 °L)
2.0 oz. (57 kg) chocolate malt (300–400 °L)
1/2 tsp. baking soda (added to mash)
1 tsp. Irish moss
9.25 AAU Perle hops (bittering) (1.2 oz./33 g of 8% alpha acid)
Wyeast 1084 or White Labs WLP004
3/4 cup corn sugar (for bottling)

Step by Step

Bring 9 quarts (9 L) of water to 166 °F (74 °C) and mix in the malts and baking soda. The temperature should fall between 154–156 °F (68–69 °C). Hold mash for 60 minutes before sparging. Recirculate the wort until clear and then run off wort to the kettle. Once the top of the grain bed is covered by an inch of wort, begin sparging with 176 °F (80 °C) water. Collect 6 gallons (23 L) of wort. Bring wort to a boil, add hops and boil for 60 minutes. Add Irish moss 5 minutes before the end of boil. Cool wort to 70 °F (21 °C), aerate, pitch yeast and ferment at 70 °F (21 °C). Rack after 10 days and a second time in another 14 days. Then prime, bottle and hold 7 days before drinking.

This is the classic stout to serve on mixed gas using a stout faucet. If this method is desired, skip the priming and bottling step and use the technique detailed on page 33.

Extract with grains option: An extract version of this beer can be made by substituting the pale malt for 6.0 lbs. (2.7 kg) of light liquid malt extract or 4.25 lbs. (1.9 kg) of light dry malt extract.​

Minus the Irish Moss, it gave me the right series of steps to flounder my way through whole mess.
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First issue: Sparging was WAY harder than I expected and resulted in a lot of stickiness and some lost mash.

Second issue: A lot more fat stayed in the cake slurry than I'd have hoped.

Third issue: I'm not sure if it's the properties of the mash or the fat, but that wort would NOT cool down. I was up late.

Fourth issue: I picked the wrong container to cool to measure gravity, and by that time of night I was done trying, so this is yet another beer for which I will have no ABV.
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Somehow, despite the fat that settled on top of the carboy, it started fermenting like a champ somewhere between 7 and 15 hours in. I'm tentatively excited that my Let Them Eat Cake Stout, which I made specifically for my girlfriend who rather enjoys big, heavy beers during the Texas summer, might actually make it.

Updates to come.

 

[bjartur]

Fermentation slowed quite a bit but it is still going. Provided I keep seeing some movement, I won't worry too much.

 

[bjartur]

Second update, two parts:

1st:
The defatting process was the most worrisome. Not terribly difficult, but I didn't do a great job either. There is a skein of fat on top of the wort, but air gets through so fermentation is ok.

I think the issue was that I didn't use enough water in the slurry and it was too viscous to let the fat float to the top and settle. This calls for 1-2 qts for that, but I was using a pretty big cake, so I probably needed 3-4 qt. That, plus the 13 qt for mash and 6.5 for sparge already puts you over 5.5 gallons, and then the beer, but with evap, loss from defatting, etc, you should be fine.

2nd:
As promised, here is the ingredient list:

 

[TheHappyHopper]

I'm interested to see how this turns out.

My one thought is that there has got to be a way to get the same cake-flavor, but without having to go through the whole baking process, like maybe just use the ingredients from the cake (minus the oil/butter?) to the mash, so you avoid the whole fat issue. That would certainly be an experiment for someone more adventurous that me...

 

[bjartur]

I'm interested to see how this turns out.

My one thought is that there has got to be a way to get the same cake-flavor, but without having to go through the whole baking process, like maybe just use the ingredients from the cake (minus the oil/butter?) to the mash, so you avoid the whole fat issue. That would certainly be an experiment for someone more adventurous that me...

If this one turns out well, I may try that approach. My worry is that the boil won't approximate baking chemistry well enough and a lot of the proteins, sugars and such from the cake ingredients will go out with the sludge.

 

[Psylocide]

Are you fermenting in a bucket or carboy? If the latter, I think we need a picture.

 

[Hello]

What do you mean when you say the ingredients list left off a recipe?
The right side of the page is the recipe, entirely. Just an FYI as a new all grain brewer, buy rice hulls and have at least a pound on hand because once I saw this recipe you've posted, cake + water = sticky mess.

I'm very curious how this turns out since from what I gather, you didn't use the recipe itself but a dry Irish stout recipe.

 

[bjartur]

I just meant there was no detailed recipe, only mashing instructions and boil time by way of saying when to hop. The way it is written leaves a lot of ambiguity for the uninitiated.

I only used the Irish Stout recipe as a guideline. I used all the ingredients in the image, but consulted the more detailed recipe where I felt uncertain (such as racking time).

This absolutely was a sticky mess. What is the purpose of the rice hulls?

 

[bjartur]

Are you fermenting in a bucket or carboy? If the latter, I think we need a picture.

I only have a picture of the carboy immediately after pitch. However, since the fat is preventing a head from forming on the wort, this is exactly as it looks today (albeit without an airlock).

 

[bjartur]

Just a quick update. I'm supposed to rack tomorrow evening but I won't be moving to a secondary but rather agitating the carboy to redistribute things.

Fermentation this morning is exceedingly slow, but the lock is still moving.

 

[bjartur]

The beer fermented like a champ. I transferred to my bottling bucket last night and it smell delectable, not to mention potent.

At the end, I had 17x 750ml bottles and 11 500mls. My lady can't drink to keep up with me and I didn't want her to feel obliged to finish a big bottle just because.

Primed with cane sugar. Of course, with the fat content that went into the carboy, I'm still worried about carbonation. My lady says I concern myself with brewing like she did school and does work. Not sure how to take that.

One week until I can pop a top.

 

[bjartur]

Sorry to go radio silent. Lots of travel lately.

I was worried about this brew from the start, as it was my first beer with alt ingredients and my first AG. But it fermented and carbonated very well.

Unfortunately, it didn't much come out as the style I intended. The body is light for a stout, both in mouthfeel and in color. It looks a lot more like a very malty, roasted brown. It pours with an a great, two inch head but that dissipates at once because I couldn't get enough of the fat out. Oh well, that's to be expected.

The nose is interesting and smells more spiced than roasty or chocolatey. Pleasant (but as I said too light) mouthfeel with sweet, roasty notes that remind me of a mix between a dubbel and a dopplebock. Not sure how I ended up there, but c'est la vie.

Surprisingly little of the cake flavor came through. Seems to have transformed to more of a spiced porter or, as I said above, a dubbel-bock. Totally quaffable, but missed the mark by a wide margin, I'm afraid.

 

[UCChemE05]

Did you think about trying to use a dry cake mix? Something like a confetti cake may have some more flavor get through.

 

[bjartur]

If I do a similar brew again, I may try dry ingredients only. I really wanted the fullest expression of chocolate cake flavors, though, and not just chocolate. I can probably do a better job of getting the fat out of the cake.