Home Brewing | Brew Days | AG #4 - Four Shades of Stout

My forth all grain brew was stout, from a recipe off the jimsbeerkit.co.uk forums. I did a 60 minute boil instead of the usual 90, and decided to go with Nottingham yeast instead of S-04 to get a slightly drier finish.

Ingredients and Method

Four Shades of Stout

Brewlength 23L

3.23 kg Marris Otter
0.50 kg Flaked Barley
0.25 kg Amber Malt
0.25 kg Chocolate Malt
0.20 kg Roasted Barley
0.20 kg Carafa Special III

20.00 gm Cascade 60 min
20.00 gm East Kent Goldings 60 min
1 Protafloc Tablet 15 mins boil

1 pack of Nottingham yeast. 

OG 1045 (I got 1042)
4.5% ABV
28.8 IBUs
37 SRM

Writeup
(Click on images for full size versions)

Started at around 11am. Treated the water with half a campden tablet per 5 gallons. Also added various salts to get the water profile closer to that needed for a stout.

Lots of different grains this time - here are the roasted malts and barley.

Doughing in. Mash was 3 to 1. Start temperature was 67C. Let it mash for 90 minutes or so then batch sparged.

The hops. Original recipe called for 40g of Cascade. I only had 24g of Cascade left so bumped up the IBUs with 20g of EKG.

First runnings and first wort hops in - very black :)

Coming to the boil - very close to the top once it's a rolling boil.

I need to remember to make sure I brew on a windy day. On a still day the room becomes a beer sauna...

Chiller on.

Checking the gravity - it's a bit off - 1040 / 42 instead of 1045. I think I only get about 70% efficiency when batch sparging so need to add more grain to compensate in future or consider fly sparging.

Trub left behind in the boiler

Full FV and rehydrated Nottingham yeast pitched.

Correct volume of 23L collected for the first time but at the expense of gravity. Need to work on my mash efficiency.

A pretty smooth brewday and I'm building up a nice stock of beer for xmas now. Getting the HLT and boiler being controlled by the brewtroller will make things easier and will be the next step.