Coffee Stout Home Brewing Session – UPDATED

Since my pumpkin porter, which I still have to bottle, I haven’t brewed anything in 4 weeks.  A good dry spell for me.  But I heard that a NJ chain Bar, The Office Bar & Grill, was going to be having a homebrewing contest.  The winner would go up to High Point Brewing in Butler NJ and get to make their beer.  I don’t enter many brewing competitions, but I would love to opportunity to brew with Greg Zaccardi and Brian Baxter up at High Point.  With that in mind, I’m not going to give the exact recipe this time, nor full process I used or the type and amount of coffee used.  After the competition is over in Dec, I will try to update this with more exact info.

Two days prior to the brewing session I made my starter with California II (White Labs WLP001) yeast.   For the starter I made an 800ml starter with 3.8 oz of ultra light DME which had an OG of 1.040.  After the gravity reading I had a final volume of 600ml for the starter.  I felt this should be sufficient for 1.050 OG stout.

I really need a new grain mill, the one I have really sucks.  It takes me about 45 minutes to grind up 12lbs of grain and I’m constantly having to adjust the grind wheel.  It is either not enough or to much crush.  I guess is should make my life easier and spend $120+ for a good mill since I rarely get my grains pre-crushed.

Here is what took me 45 minutes to grind up, crank turn by crank turn:

• 9.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 79.09 %
• 1.00 lb Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM) Grain 8.79 %
• 0.88 lb Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM) Grain 7.73 %
• 0.25 lb Barley, Flaked (1.7 SRM) Grain 2.20 %
• 0.25 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt – 60L (60.0 SRM)

The Mash:

This was a single infusion mash of all the grain at 152.5°.  (I love my new digital thermometer!).  For this beer, I did a 60 minute sparge at 170°.  I intended to do a bit longer.  Was shooting for a 75minute sparge, but I had the outflow to the kettle a bit faster then I wanted.

The Boil:

A very simply boil for this beer basically, 1/2 oz of Target Pellet Hops (12.1%) at 60min followed by 1 oz last 2 minutes of Tettnag Pellet Hops (4.7%). Then cooled down to 70° to match the temp of the starter.

With a coffee shout you want to add the coffee after the boil. It is up to you if you want it in the Primary or Secondary fermentor.

The Original Gravity on this beer was 1.048 and I’m expecting it to complete around 1.012.

I will update this post as the brew process continues.

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THE UPDATE:

This beer won 2nd place in the competition.  My method for the coffee was a cold press.  I added 700 ml of Coffee to the secondary the day before I bottled.

The method:

1. sanitized 32oz of water, cooled

2. very coarsely ground .5 lb of Italian Dark Roast Coffee (if I was to do it again, I might mix in some Sumatra for a bit of earthy nuttiness)

3. Add ground coffee to cold sanitized water.

4. let sit in Fridge for 14 hours.

5.  Strain through Coffee Filter/cheese cloth, you don’t want the grounds in your beer.

This resulted in about 700 ml of cold coffee.  The reason for this method, since there is no boil the chemicals that make coffee acidic are not released which yields a much smoother beer.