Need help with imperial stout recipe

[shaarm]

I have been working on an imperial stout recipe. I have brewed it a couple times now. I entered a competition where it scored a 40. The comments indicated that the only thing they would change would be to add roasted aromas or add "roast in the nose".

Being that I am competitive and I didn't win anything to date, I'd like to improve the beer. I love drinking it the way it is, but I want to win. Right now I have around 27 pounds of grain, including 2# chocolate malt, 1# roasted barley and 1# of a debittered black malt. All told I have roughly 14% dark malts.

Any help on how to increase the roast in the nose?

 

[RmikeVT]

40 is a pretty high score.

Just a few ideas:

What about base malt? Possibly sub in some Maris Otter or UK Pale Malt or Dark Munich.

Maybe Sub out some of the base malt for Brown Malt

http://byo.com/hops/item/1751-brown-malt
http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/crisp-brown-malt

Or a toasted malt such as Victory, Biscuit, Special Roast or Honey malt.

 

[shaarm]

Yeah, 40 is good. I am pretty happy with the recipe, but if I could tweak it a little, I'd love to do that. This category usually has a lot of entries in the couple of local competitions I enter just for fun. I'd love to win something some day, even though I know it is all subjective. I think subconsciously it will validate that I can actually make good beer (even though I like it which should be all that matters)

Right now I have a combo of 2-row and a decent amount of munich as base malts. I also have some crystal malts including 60 and 120/150 mixed in. I took bits and pieces of various recipes on the site, along with some info from designing great beers and the ingredients of some of my favorite stouts. I was hoping one of my techniques could help with roasted aroma. Maybe when it is added to mash, something to do with ph, I don't really know which is why I am reaching out.

I will look into those suggestions.