"Careful man, there's a beverage here!"

While my return to homebrewing and blogging began on Dec 20, two days after my PhD thesis defense, I still haven't posted anything since earlier in January when I announced my return to homebrewing and blogging. My first post-defense brew was bottled on Jan 12, and as it's a new recipe of a high gravity style with a complex flavor palate, I have yet to give it a try because I want to allow it plenty of time to mellow and meld so my first taste won't give a bad impression. That said, I do owe you, my readers, a post detailing its brewing, especially since I'll be brewing two batches in the next two weekends and I want to get this off my plate.

"I got a rash, man.  I got a rash..." 

I had the idea for my most recent batch, an imperial milk stout with coffee, from The Big Lebowski (TBL), the Coen Brothers' 1998 cult hit and my all-time favorite movie. I first saw this movie when hallmates of mine in my first year of college invited me into their room on Wednesday night in January 2001, handed me a cheap beer, sat me down, and pressed play on their DVD player. I was subjected to 2+ hours of a rambling shaggy dog detective story that melded elements of bowling noir, Raymond Chandler, LA-ness, and all the rest, and loved the heck out of it. I loved it. I loved it. I loved it. Only the relationship with my wife has been as rapidly strong and long-lasting. I made a costume of one of the main characters for Halloween 2003 and have worn it every time I've seen it on the big screen since, even when meeting Jeff "The Dude" Bridges after a Q&A following a showing of the film at UCSB. I try to bring it into conversation, have sat people down with a white russian in hand and turned them onto one of the greatest films of the later 20th century, and even worked it into a short answer midterm in a college course on human sexuality ("a natural, zesty enterprise"). It's my favorite movie.

I seek out all things Lebowski and even found a podcast that focused on the movie and the cult subculture that grew up around it. It was while going through the back catalog of the Lebowski Podcast that I had the idea for this beer. Listening to how TBL has inspired creative output from many people I thought, "what can I do to express my love for TBL?" Then I remembered: I brew beer! Beer is my drink of choice, as is evident by this blog, but I do enjoy one cocktail: the white russian, also The Dude's drink of choice. Also know as a caucasian, a white russian is one part vodka to one part kahlua, or other coffee liqueur, topped with cream or half-and-half and served on ice in a tumbler. It's rich, creamy, and can be a kick in the seat if you make it right. Most cocktails are either too alcoholy, or too sweet, but this drink is perfect. So I thought, "I could turn this into a beer, but how?" I knew it should be high in alcohol, be rich and creamy, and have a coffee hint to it. Those of you in the know can guess where I'm going with this, especially since I already mentioned it: imperial milk stout with coffee. Stouts already have a coffee idea in them from using roasted barley in brewing them, and milk stouts are a well-known variety with a delightfully creamy body. To increase the alcohol content I went imperial, doubling the base malt and adding Belgian candi sugar during the boil to have a lot of sugar for the yeast to convert to alcohol. Also, this was my first 2-gal batch, and therefore tested my ability to successfully brew larger batches.

 

The basics.

First (left) and second (right) runnings.

I oven mashed in my new 5-gal stock pot and the temperature measurements over the 90-min mash were flat at 154°F. Straining out the first runnings and steep sparging for the second runnings went without a hitch. But when I came to the boil I found the effect of doubling the batch size: a much longer needed time to bring the pre-wort to boil. Water has a high heat capacity, which is the amount of energy needed to increase the temperature of a mass of the material, and the smaller burners of my apartment stove top do not have enough the heat output to bring almost 3 gallons of pre-wort to boil in a timely fashion. It took 45 minutes for the heat break, about twice as long as my former, smaller batches, and so I have to keep that in mind when scheduling my brew days. During the boil hops, lactose, and irish moss were added, and at flameout I added the clear Belgian candi sugar.

High alpha acid hops to balance the malty goodness.

Heat break!  That protein laden foam reminded me of cappuccino, appropriate for the style.

In they go!

And now the lactose, early enough to sanitize it in the boiling wort.

Yeast hydrated and ready to pitch.

After the 90-min boil I cooled the wort in my usual way by placing the stock pot in an ice bath in my cube cooler. As with the boil, I found it also takes a longer time to bring a larger volume of wort down from 212°F, and the ice bath technique might need to be replaced with a cooling coil. I don't have the money for a cooling coil right now so for the next batch I'll try to beef up my ice bath, but with this one I found two 7-lb bags of ice isn't quite enough. Cooling the wort is one of the most critical points in brewing, for as soon it begins to cool and before pitching the yeast, anything could get in there and infect the liquid, resulting in gross and not yummy final product. I've read that the wort should be cooled in 10-20 minutes. My previous batches took 20-30 minutes to cool, not bad but could be improved, but the 45 minutes found with this batch is right out and an improvement is needed. A friend uses frozen bottles of water as reusable ice blocks, and right now I have 16+ such bottles in my freezer for my next batch. I'll report how this works after my next batch, but now we return to the imperial milk stout with coffee.

Those sharpie lines mark the volume.  I got exactly two gallons of wort!

Before brewing this first 2-gal batch I talked with the owner of The Brew Mentor about mash and sparge water amounts for all-grain brew-in-a-bag brewing. He suggested using 1.5 qt strike water per lb grain for the mash, that 0.1 gal is a good estimate of strike water absorbed per lb grain, and to aim for 0.1 gal more than your final desired batch size with a 0.8-1.0 gal/hr boil-off rate. I coded all this in my homebrewing excel workbook, but for this first batch I forgot I was doing a 90-min imperial boil so I  miscalculated the needed sparge water. I was fortunate that I did get at least 2 gallons of wort in which to pitch the yeast. With the wort cooled, the yeast pitched, and the blow-off tube and bottle in place, the larger fermenter was put in the broom closet as it was the largest dark region I have in my apartment where I didn't mind a yeast aroma permeating the volume for 2-3 weeks. I tried in vain to find an opaque plastic bin tall and wide enough for my new 3-gal glass carboy, but didn't find one that didn't look like I had a large trash can in my dining room, something my wife wasn't keen on. So until we move out of our Cleveland Heights apartment the broom closet will be my fermenting room.

In went whole coffee beans to "dry hop" for a couple weeks.

To get the coffee-ness for my white russian beer I went with a stout since the roasted barley in that style imparts a coffee sense to the final product. But I wanted to have real coffee imparting that flavor as well, so I went to the internet to find what others have done before me. There are a plethora of ways one can put coffee into beer: normally brew coffee and cool it down before putting into the beer at bottling; cold-press coffee with sanitized water and put into the beer at bottling; put whole beans in the boil; put coarse ground beans in the boil; pour the wort through coarse ground beans into the primary fermenter; put coarse ground beans in the secondary after primary fermentation; put whole beans in the secondary after primary fermentation, á la dry hopping; and others I don't remember off the top of my head. After doing all this research I chose to go with the easiest method by putting whole beans in the secondary, but how much?  The forum where I found this method suggested 1/4 lb per 5 gal batch for a "huge coffee flavor/aroma." This translates to 0.10 lb for a 2-gal batch, but I wasn't looking for huge coffee flavor and aroma, so I brought it down to 0.0625 lb, or 1 oz of whole coffee beans. This same homebrewing forum poster said he's never had an infection from throwing in whole beans without attempting to sanitize them, so I did the same. This was after fermentation complete, and the alcohol and acid content of the beer is enough to keep it safe from minor possible contamination. As pictured above, the beans floated around for a while, and two weeks later when I bottled most of the beans had settled into the trub at the bottom of the carboy. That didn't make syphoning the beer into the bottling bucket easy, but it wasn't easy overall to syphon the beer into the bottling bucket.

Check out my new bottling bucket!  It worked like a dream.

Did I say it was difficult to syphon the beer into the bottling bucket? Because I meant to say it was nearly impossible. I nearly gave up. I restarted the syphon seven times, and when it finally worked I think it was because I was allowed the syphon to fully start before moving the tube to the bucket. And where did I get this nifty new 2-gal bottling bucket pictured above? When I first toyed with increasing to 2-3 gal batches my brewing pal Pete bought this small bucket. I never took it from him, not wanting to primary ferment in plastic, but now that I actually have a 3-gal carboy for brewing larger batches I bought the bucket from Pete, bought a small valve, drilled a hole into the bucket side near the bottom, installed the valve and tested it to find it leak-free, and for use sanitized and assembled the bucket-and-valve. Once I got the beer syphoned into the bucket I re-sanitized the tube, inserted the sanitized bottling wand into the tube end, stuck the other tube end onto the valve, and started bottling. Sixteen 12-oz bottles and one 22-oz bomber bottle later and bottling was done. I cleaned and sanitized the bottles, using a simple 16-bottle drying rack I designed and machined out of aluminum scrap found in my physics department machine shop. Turns out 1-inch tall stubs are not tall enough to keep longneck beer bottles from toppling over, but if you're careful it can be done, and will have to be as I don't have the time to machine another 16 stubs. But it works and that's good enough for now. Not having to rely on another syphon for bottling was wonderful, and a welcome improvement to my brewing.

OG measurement of 1.091.  That's one high gravity beer!

FG of 1.031. Thought it would be lower, but remember, there's lactose in there!

With the beer bottled it was time to measure the final gravity of the sample I took before mixing the priming sugar into the finished beer. The OG was 1.091, a high gravity expected for the style of beer I was aiming to make. The FG was 1.031, not quite as low as I expected, and with the OG gave a 8.7%  ABV, not quite as high I wanted. I was aiming to make an imperial stout, and as such wanted a 10+% ABV. Starting from my Stout & About recipe, which itself was an imperial stout, I merely doubled the amount of base malt, scaling from 1 to 2-gal brewing, and I added Belgian candi sugar to increase the fermentable sugar without adding more body that more base malt would add. However, more base malt  may be the better way to go next time if I don't find this batch to be quite what I'm hoping for. If I do increase the base malt the next time I brew this recipe I might have to consider my mash efficiency. I currently do not measure this, but could, and in doing so I could gain insight into how well I carry out the mash. I also added Carapils malt, aka Cara-8, to the grain bill as it supposedly adds dextrin to the mash which gives the final product body, something I felt my previous stout recipe lacked. I want a stout to make my mouth feel full, especially as this recipe is an impression of a white russian cocktail. We'll see how it all turns out when I try the first bottle! At this point I'm making myself nervous and anxious with anticipation and just need do it and get it over with, like calling a girl when you're 15.

18 effective bottles of beer.  Not bad for my first 2-gal batch.

And now for the recipe:

The Dude Abides

Grain Bill:

5.00 lb Marris Otter Malt

0.50 lb Roasted Barley

0.50 lb Crystal 40L Malt

0.15 lb Munich Malt

0.15 lb Carapils Malt (body)

0.25 lb flaked wheat (head formation)

Strike 9.83 qt H2O to 165°F. Mash in oven for 90 minutes at 155°F. Sparge with 4.4 qt H2O at 170°F.

90-min Boil:

1.38 oz Willamette hops 4.7/5.3 AA% @ 90 min

1.50 oz UK Fuggle hops 5.3 AA% @ 90 min

6.4 oz lactose @ 45 min

1/4 tsp irish  moss @ 45 min

9.6 oz clear Belgian candi sugar @ flameout

Cool to 68°F in an ice bath. Hydrate and pitch 1 packet Safale S-04 yeast. Dry hop with 1 oz whole Breakfast Coffee beans after one week. Bottle with 1.5 oz priming sugar.

This recipe is exactly what I did. For an imperial beer a 90-min boil is often carried out but I forgot about that until I came to the boil, so the amount of sparge water and the timing of the non-hop boil additions aren't exactly what should be done for a 90-min boil. We won't know until I taste the first bottle. The full gallery of this batch can be found here.

I will try this beer soon and will update this post with my impression. If the first bottle lets me down, here's to time healing all wounds. Dr. Bradley's Brewing Co. is open for brewing!

Is there a beer you were dying to brew, and how did it turn out the first time? If bad, did you go back and tweak it until it came out or was it so bad that you gave up?

Until next time friends, happy brewing!

P.S.  I've sat on this entry long enough to have tasted this batch while brewing with a friend this weekend. One word: Success! And more than I hoped for: this beer is strong, smooth, and infused with coffee but not overpowered by it. It could be a littler creamier, but this beer is nothing to be ashamed of.  I am rather pleased with myself that my first batch after some time off and of a larger size turned out great.  I am ready to more forward with more 2-gal batches!  Dr. Bradley's Brewing Company has proven it's worth!