Toffee flavor

[VillageBrew]

I was researching a Russian Imperial Stout recipe and I came accross a statement that said if you increase your boil time from 60 to 90 mins it will caramalize your sugars more and give a toffee flavor. This is an extract recipe. Any thoughts???

 

[charliehorse]

I've used this technique on other styles and did get a toffee flavor. Extract vs. All-Grain don't matter one you have your wort in your boil kettle. In all-grain brewing, you're extracting the sugars from the grains yourself (or letting the Amylase do it) and with extract, you're paying somebody else to do that for you. Once the wort is boiling, everything is the same.

 

[JonM]

You can also do kettle carameliztion (remove, say, 20% of your wort and separately boil it down to a thick caramelized syrup) and add it back to the main wort.

And FWIW, I did a barley wine a while back that was all Maris Otter and I boiled it for 3.5 hours. Its flavor is wonderfully toffee-like.

 

[MVKTR2]

I'd suggest a combination of 60-90 lovibond crystal malt and boiling 1-1.5 gallons of wort down into a syrup of about a quart should get you where you want to be. Toffee is merely sugar and butter cooked to 300-305F then cooled. Toffee type of caramel where as traditional pliable caramel may or may not have butter but has whole milk and/or cream. Both have milk fat and it is what makes them caramels rather than hardened invert sugars. At least that is how I understand it.

So, caramel/toffee flavors come from heating sugars to a certain point. In theory I suspect you could heat sugar to close to 300F and pour it in the boiling wort to achieve a similar effect.

Finally with an extract based Imperial Stout you're gonna be fighting against too high of a finishing gravity. You'll want to add plain table sugar or corn sugar at 8-12% of your fermentables if you're adding in crystal malts and/or have a high % of roasted grain.