Scaling up Fremont Brewing's barrel aged Dark Star Oatmeal Stout recipe - increase just base malt or proportional ?

[madscientist451]

Right. What do you suggest ?

I'll suggest brewing the recipe you've developed and then getting some beer friends over for a taste comparison with the commercial beer.
Try to pick out what you would change, but only change one thing at a time on the re-brew.

 

[brewman !]

Update: I brewed my Dark Star Clone on the weekend.

OG was 1.087. I'm aiming for ~10% ABV before I add whiskey and age it in a wooden "barrel".

It smells delicious - chocolate, raisin, plum. I cut back the roasted malts a bit as I'm not a huge fan of coffee flavors in my beers.

Not sure if this one will get aged or not. If this thing tastes like I think it will, we might drink it and I'll brew another one to age.

Thanks for the discussions in this thread. I'll update it with tasting notes when that happens.

 

[brewman !]

A common complaint of this beer is the coffee flavor is too forward.

 

[brewman !]

Turns out the 2019 version uses Carafa-2.

 

[lumbergh]

I just finished the keg of version 3. It finished a bit dry. I think it was the Nottingham yeast. It needed a touch more sweetness. I probably wouldn't use that yeast again without adding a little more c60 or adding a little lactose.

 

[skibb]

When doubling a recipe like this I would suggest a few things:

1. Do not scale up all the grains - really you only want to focus on increasing the base malt to get your OG where it needs to be. Only after do some slight tweaking (probably upping the roast a bit to compensate for the residual sweetness that may come from all the extra body). Think of specialty grains as a set weight per 5 gallon batch - doubling your roasted malts percentages would make this beer unreasonably bitter/acrid.

2. This is barrel aged so my guess is (not had trying it) that it's FG is somewhere around 1.040-1.060. On average we pick up about ~2-2.5% ABV from a whiskey barrel so I would likely shoot for a 10.5% beer

3. Because of this higher FG I would mash very high and throw in a crap ton of yeast. Honestly I would lean more towards US-05 because its dry and cheap and you can throw in several packets to ensure full attenuation. This beer is barrel aged so esters and yeast character with all this malt will be minimal to not present at all.