Imperial Stout Russian Imperial Stout (2011 HBT Competition Category Winner)

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Opened a bottle yesterday, 4 months in the bottle. Still has some alcohol heat. Nice raisin notes, complimented by the bourbon oak vanilla flavor and chocolate from the nibs. Wish I treated more of this batch. I'd say the experiment is a success.
 
I added raisin puree, 80% Cao cao nips, and freshly roasted coffee from a local roaster. it's somthin else I tell ya...
 
putting this here....😊



gtibrews2 said:
okay....my taste description....

rich strong chocolate fades into a splash of direct coffee bitterness. it then spreads into a complex vanilla raisiny bread pudding....with a sweet fruity walnut finish that warms slightly
( 13%abv). another delightful note I noticed after the second drink. Is the juicy acidity dancing on the back of your tongue.


this is a beautiful complex beer....I'm cellaring most of it. it's been 9 long months and God damn it's worth it.
Click to expand...
 
I brewed this beer about 2 years ago and I can simply say that this was the best stout I've ever made! I just bough my ingredients today, except I now have a much larger system so I'm going to make 11 gallons and then I'm going to grab 3 gallons in a second running , just because I have a 3 gallon Carboy. I'll keep all posted.
 
What temp did u guys sparge at? I just built a recirculating system so I'm curious what works best. I made this amazing brew a while ago and I'd love to hear what works best.
 
Question about transfering off the yeast to let it age/sit...

I originally fermented this in a 3.5 gallon mini-brew bucket from stainless steel... I filled up to the 3 gallon mark or so from my brew figuring I'd lose quite a bit from a strong and vigorous fermentation and blow off as well as for sampling for a gravity reading. When I went to transfer from the spigot, I moved it to a 3 gallon glass carboy, but after trub/blowoff/hydrometer losses I want to guess I only got about 2.5 or so gallons in my glass fermenter which means there's obviously a decent amount of air in the fermenter between the top of the beer and air lock... should I be worried that this will ruin and or affect my final product?

What can I do differently next time to make sure there's minimal oxygen/air contact?
 
armenianbrewer said:
Question about transfering off the yeast to let it age/sit...

I originally fermented this in a 3.5 gallon mini-brew bucket from stainless steel... I filled up to the 3 gallon mark or so from my brew figuring I'd lose quite a bit from a strong and vigorous fermentation and blow off as well as for sampling for a gravity reading. When I went to transfer from the spigot, I moved it to a 3 gallon glass carboy, but after trub/blowoff/hydrometer losses I want to guess I only got about 2.5 or so gallons in my glass fermenter which means there's obviously a decent amount of air in the fermenter between the top of the beer and air lock... should I be worried that this will ruin and or affect my final product?

What can I do differently next time to make sure there's minimal oxygen/air contact?
Click to expand...

There'll still be some residual co2 in the beer at this point that will escape and push that oxygen out. You should be just fine, I've never had an issue with a gallons worth of head space and bulk aging.
 
armenianbrewer said:
Question about transfering off the yeast to let it age/sit...

I originally fermented this in a 3.5 gallon mini-brew bucket from stainless steel... I filled up to the 3 gallon mark or so from my brew figuring I'd lose quite a bit from a strong and vigorous fermentation and blow off as well as for sampling for a gravity reading. When I went to transfer from the spigot, I moved it to a 3 gallon glass carboy, but after trub/blowoff/hydrometer losses I want to guess I only got about 2.5 or so gallons in my glass fermenter which means there's obviously a decent amount of air in the fermenter between the top of the beer and air lock... should I be worried that this will ruin and or affect my final product?

What can I do differently next time to make sure there's minimal oxygen/air contact?
Click to expand...


you beer will explode....sorry dude💣






just kidding...it's fine. co2 pushes it out.
 
So after 7 days it has come from 1.095 to 1.018, roughly 10% abv! Smells like hot alcohol still, but tastes outstanding! Gunna transfer to secondary and let it sit the closet til December!
 
DagoBrewer said:
There'll still be some residual co2 in the beer at this point that will escape and push that oxygen out. You should be just fine, I've never had an issue with a gallons worth of head space and bulk aging.
Click to expand...

Awesome! I'm happy to hear that..

I have a new question.. I brewed this July 3rd, and Transfered to secondary a month later around Aug 8. Now I'm wondering when I should go to bottle and if I need to worry about bottle conditioning/carbonation.

For my bulk aging schedule, I was thinking Halloween might be a good time to bottle which would give it about 3 months in secondary.

With the yeast inactive for this long, and especially since it's been off the cake, will I need to add yeast to the bottling bucket to ensure bottles get carbed when I add my priming sugar? Or should I leave it as is and hope whatever residual yeast floating around in the beer should be sufficient to carb my bottles? Would it just take longer than the typical 2 week wait?
 
armenianbrewer said:
Awesome! I'm happy to hear that..

I have a new question.. I brewed this July 3rd, and Transfered to secondary a month later around Aug 8. Now I'm wondering when I should go to bottle and if I need to worry about bottle conditioning/carbonation.

For my bulk aging schedule, I was thinking Halloween might be a good time to bottle which would give it about 3 months in secondary.

With the yeast inactive for this long, and especially since it's been off the cake, will I need to add yeast to the bottling bucket to ensure bottles get carbed when I add my priming sugar? Or should I leave it as is and hope whatever residual yeast floating around in the beer should be sufficient to carb my bottles? Would it just take longer than the typical 2 week wait?
Click to expand...

The yeast will wake up and start eating the sugar you introduce at bottling time which will cause your bottles to carbonate. I'd say check a bottle after a couple weeks. If it's carbed good enough get those babies in the fridge so you don't get bottle bombs. if it's not, let it sit another week or two.
 
DagoBrewer said:
The yeast will wake up and start eating the sugar you introduce at bottling time which will cause your bottles to carbonate. I'd say check a bottle after a couple weeks. If it's carbed good enough get those babies in the fridge so you don't get bottle bombs. if it's not, let it sit another week or two.
Click to expand...


Great! My OG was 1.1 and had a FG of 1.024... but do you think if I kept the bottles cellared and only refrigerated when I was closer to drinking, I could end up with bottle bombs? I am not even anywhere close to being able to keg right now (no fridge nor keg nor knowhow and so on to keg so I just bottle everything I make).
 
I guess just do what you've been doing. I live in san diego and its hot in my garage almost year round so if i do bottle some i have to keep it cold once it's carbed cuz I've had a few blow up and that sucks! I just keg. It's a million times easier!
 
People have added yeast back, go back in the thread it's talked about. The last batch I brewed took forever to carb
 
armenianbrewer said:
Great! My OG was 1.1 and had a FG of 1.024... but do you think if I kept the bottles cellared and only refrigerated when I was closer to drinking, I could end up with bottle bombs? I am not even anywhere close to being able to keg right now (no fridge nor keg nor knowhow and so on to keg so I just bottle everything I make).
Click to expand...


As long as you don't add way too much primary NF sugar, you shouldn't have to worry about bottle bombs. The yeast should have already eaten all the sugars it will eat in the beer, so all it will eat is the sugar you add.

And it might take a lot longer than a few weeks to card up with the high ABV, as the remaining yeast will likely be a bit sluggish to get going. The last high ABV RIS I made took a couple months to finally carb up to where it was supposed to, your results may vary though.
 
As long as you don't add way too much priming sugar, you shouldn't have to worry about bottle bombs. The yeast should have already eaten all the sugars it will eat in the beer, so all it will eat is the sugar you add.

And it might take a lot longer than a few weeks to card up with the high ABV, as the remaining yeast will likely be a bit sluggish to get going. The last high ABV RIS I made took a couple months to finally carb up to where it was supposed to, your results may vary though.
 
JBone120 said:
As long as you don't add way too much priming sugar, you shouldn't have to worry about bottle bombs. The yeast should have already eaten all the sugars it will eat in the beer, so all it will eat is the sugar you add.

And it might take a lot longer than a few weeks to card up with the high ABV, as the remaining yeast will likely be a bit sluggish to get going. The last high ABV RIS I made took a couple months to finally carb up to where it was supposed to, your results may vary though.
Click to expand...

I was aiming for a target of 2.5 vols of CO2, as even for my stouts I do like a little bit of extra carbonation since this is a sipper.... and two months is nuts! I think my bottling volume will be somewhere along the order of 2.25-2.5 gallons so I'll definitely have plenty of bottles to sample for a while since it's such a big beer and thus see how the carbonation improves/changes over time




rbach2 said:
I used CBC-1 at the direction of another poster in this thread (https://www.morebeer.com/products/dry-yeast-cbc1-11.html?gclid=CKOg99X2oc8CFY9bfgodDKwFxQ). I used half of the packet with some priming sugar. Couldn't tell you how it turned out though. Bottled in June and I still haven't cracked one. Hid them away in a closet.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice and tip! Since I still have about 6 weeks before I'm ready to bottle, I will most certainly read up on it. I'm just very weary and scared of bottle bombs so adding a new strain yeast scares me just a tad but hey, if it works then that's pretty awesome. Do you remember what you had for your target volumes of CO2? 2.5?

As I mentioned earlier, my OG was 1.100, and last time I checked my FG which was 3 weeks post pitch it had dropped to 1.024 and I deemed that close to a successful attention/fermentation.

I just wouldnt want this CBC-1 to suddenly ferment something additional to the priming sugar that I suspect some of the original WLP-007 yeast will consume too
 
I brewed a version of this 2 months ago and will be bottling this sometime next week. I am adding CBC-1 yeast to make sure that these carb up properly. Looking forward to trying these sometime mid to end of November. Can't wait. It tasted amazing when racking to secondary.
 
Steveg229 said:
I brewed a version of this 2 months ago and will be bottling this sometime next week. I am adding CBC-1 yeast to make sure that these carb up properly. Looking forward to trying these sometime mid to end of November. Can't wait. It tasted amazing when racking to secondary.
Click to expand...
What size was your batch? Do you plan on just rehydrating the entire packet of cbc-1 even though the entire packet probably can more than serve purposes for a 5 gallon batch?

http://www.danstaryeast.com/company/products/cbc-1-cask-bottle-conditioned-beer-yeast "Refermentation (100%) can be completed within 14 days at 15-25°C with an inoculation rate of 10g of yeast per hl of beer (1-2 million cells per ml)."

According to this it says 10g of yeast per hl (or almost the entire 11 g packet for 26ish gallons)
\
 
armenianbrewer said:
Awesome! I'm happy to hear that..

I have a new question.. I brewed this July 3rd, and Transfered to secondary a month later around Aug 8. Now I'm wondering when I should go to bottle and if I need to worry about bottle conditioning/carbonation.

For my bulk aging schedule, I was thinking Halloween might be a good time to bottle which would give it about 3 months in secondary.

With the yeast inactive for this long, and especially since it's been off the cake, will I need to add yeast to the bottling bucket to ensure bottles get carbed when I add my priming sugar? Or should I leave it as is and hope whatever residual yeast floating around in the beer should be sufficient to carb my bottles? Would it just take longer than the typical 2 week wait?
Click to expand...

I did a lot of research on this before I bottled mine last August. I think some of it is in this thread if you go back a year. Some said don't worry, there will be enough yeast. Others said go ahead and add more to be safe. I decided to add a 5g package of champagne yeast and carbed to 2.0 volumes. Still took forever, and still is just barely carbed now, over a year later.

DagoBrewer said:
The yeast will wake up and start eating the sugar you introduce at bottling time which will cause your bottles to carbonate. I'd say check a bottle after a couple weeks. If it's carbed good enough get those babies in the fridge so you don't get bottle bombs. if it's not, let it sit another week or two.
Click to expand...

Based on my experience, I would be surprised if it carbs up in two weeks, or honestly even two months. My next batch I will carb to about 2.3 vols instead of 2.0, but still won't touch any for several months.

armenianbrewer said:
Great! My OG was 1.1 and had a FG of 1.024... but do you think if I kept the bottles cellared and only refrigerated when I was closer to drinking, I could end up with bottle bombs? I am not even anywhere close to being able to keg right now (no fridge nor keg nor knowhow and so on to keg so I just bottle everything I make).
Click to expand...

As long as you don't add too much priming sugar, you shouldn't have to worry about bottle bombs. Champagne yeast and CBC-1 will only consume the dextrose you bottle with. They will not consume your residual sugars, even if you leave them for a year or more.

JBone120 said:
As long as you don't add way too much primary NF sugar, you shouldn't have to worry about bottle bombs. The yeast should have already eaten all the sugars it will eat in the beer, so all it will eat is the sugar you add.

And it might take a lot longer than a few weeks to card up with the high ABV, as the remaining yeast will likely be a bit sluggish to get going. The last high ABV RIS I made took a couple months to finally carb up to where it was supposed to, your results may vary though.
Click to expand...

This. Agree completely.

Also, keep in mind that this beer should age VERY well. If you start opening them early, then after 6-8 months, you're going to really wish you had back the early ones. It REALLY gets that much better.
 
10borderline11brew said:
What should my FG be?
Click to expand...

YOUR FG will be entirely dependent on your recipe, fermentation temps, amount of healthy yeast that you pitch, and many other factors. The recipe in the OP states an expected FG of 1.028. Most beers with a high starting gravity and darker grains will have unfermentable sugars and finish high. Sometimes the yeast will peter out as alcohol levels climb. I've seen mention in this thread of some brewer's beers stopping in the 40s, while others ferment out to the high teens (rare). Something between 1.024 and 1.032 would probably be most common.
 
Well...opened up my first bottle - gusher. Cracked a second - gusher. First time using CBC-1 and used less than half a package shooting for a target volume of 2.3. Pretty depressing for a 6-month project Get about 8 ounces of beer per 22 oz bottle. Anyone have any tips on fixing these? Left the second one slightly opened (slight hiss) for 5 mins and went to open it and beer volcano.
 

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