Imperial Oatmeal Stout

KGB Black

I’ve still got over 120 bottles of home brew in the garage and with half an eye on it being in a reasonable state to drink at Christmas I’ve decided that it was about time I got around to having a go at making an imperial oatmeal stout.

Whilst I’ve got a reasonable idea what I’m doing when it comes to brewing sensible strength beer, this is my first attempt at a strong number. There’s a huge amount of conflicting advice on the web, so I decided to trust my gut and go with it.

The recipe itself is just a beefed up version of the Break Stuff recipe and I used pretty much my usual process. I’ll then bottle it and put it away for a few months to condition/age.

Grain bill

OG – 1.092
IBU – 50.6
% ABV – 9.1
Batch Size – 10 Litres

One of the advantages of the Klarstein system is that you can set a timer for your strike water to heat up and, as I live on my own and therefore don’t have anyone to annoy by it sitting in the middle of the kitchen, it’s easy enough for me to get set up the night before. I do quite like lying in bed the following morning and being able to hear it kicking in!

Due to the diminutive size of the batch I decided that I would mash in the Klarstein and then boil on the hob using the kettle I got as part of the Northern Brewer kit that I started out with. For once in my life I had thought ahead and there was no way my immersion chillers would effectively cool the wort post boil had I used the Klarstein.

Always Learning

Something that occurred to me with this particular brew was that there’s a reasonable amount of dead space around the grain basket in the Klarstein which appears to mean that not all the strike water is coming into contact with the grain. That evidently isn’t an issue with a full capacity brew, but with only 15 litres of water for this brew I think this is where the gravity issue occurred.

This being my first high ABV brew, it didn’t occur to me until after the fact that I could have used more water to mash with and then increase the length of the boil.

Consequently we were a bit light on the pre-boil gravity. I did throw in another 200g of extra light DME but still only managed to get it to an OG of 1.080, some way short of what I was expecting. It will still be an imperial oatmeal stout, just perhaps not as imperial as I was originally hoping!

Still, if we end up with about 8% I can live with that. That’s if we end up with anything at all, because 24 hours on there doesn’t seem to be any sign of any fermentation going on. From what I’ve read online, imperial stout should be a fairly lively fermentation so I’m just hoping it’s taking a little while to get going. There’s plenty of yeast in there – another tip from my research being that with these high ABV beers you need to make sure you’re not shy with the yeast!