Brewing an IRISH Stout is EASIER than You Think | Grain to Glass | Classic Styles

all right what's up everybody welcome back for another video today we're gonna be doing something that I think a lot of us are actually doing right about this time of year and that is brewing an Irish dry stout obviously this is being brewed in celebration of a certain holiday in March and is modeled after a certain famous Irish beer but there's definitely still a little bit of creative Liberty that we can take within the style to keep it from being a total clone of Guinness but we're gonna go for something that's close to it but slightly different and has a personal spin on it but what I want to say before anything really is that this is actually a really easy beer to make so if you're just starting out as an all grain brewer and you don't have that many brews onto your belt yet this is probably a really good one to think about that might impress your friends that's pretty forgiving that'll come out pretty good so so hopefully if you're new to the Hobby you'll be able to get something good out of this video and you know why all means go for it try something like this and I think you'll be very pleased with the results so we're going for something that's a rather sessionable beer hopefully under five percent by just a hair and it really should have just a whole ton of flavor lots of roasts lots of body but still high drinkability the recipe is actually really simple normally we think of big heavy black stouts that have tons and tons of different specialty malts and full flavor and high finishing gravities and all that high ABV this is completely opposite of that so I'm gonna go through the recipe here and talk about how each ingredient is gonna actually affect the final beer so starting out we have seven pounds of Irish stout malt this is basically just a malt with some really fat kernels so that's gonna mean that you're actually yah can eat as much malt as you normally would to get the same efficiency as you would would say to row if you can't find specialty Irish stout malt it's basically just UK pale malt so if you can get golden promise that's another good one or Mara solder both of those will be fine and have the same effect we're guiding then two and a half pounds of flaked barley that's a lot of flake barley but what that's gonna do is give you that really kind of quintessential smooth mouthfeel you expect from this kind of beer and it's going to really make the creaminess of it come to the forefront we're gonna add a pound and a quarter of roasted barley that's actually a ton of roasted barley for most beers but this is absolutely a signature of this style and it's really kind of the only primary specialty malts or this and that's gonna give you that that perfect roast e character that you get from Guinness or other Irish type stouts so optional in this beer is a little bit of chocolate malt as well if you want a little extra roast but I'm not going to include that today for the sake of simplicity last but not least we're adding six ounces of acid malt what this is gonna do is add a nice little bite of tartness to the final beer which is characteristic of the style so we're gonna mash this at 151 degrees for 60 minutes this is going to keep the level of unfermented sugars low because we don't want this to be sweet it is a dry stout so hopefully finishes below 1010 specific gravity so we want to keep that mash temperature on the lower side instead of doing a full-bodied sweet kind of stout that you would say for like an imperial stout or an opening stat you want a higher mash temperature so for hops we are gonna do 1.7 ounces of East Kent Golding's at 60 minutes and that is a basically that's how ever much you need to get to roughly 30 to 34 Ivy use of bitterness from your bittering addition I am adding 1 ounce of East Kent Golding's at 10 minutes for aroma this is not called for by the style but I think it would be interesting and it might add a little extra complexity so these can Goulding's is a nice earthy type of hop you're really not looking for hot flavor from this but it should compliment the roasted malts if it comes through for yeast we are using the Y east 1084 Irish ale this is kind of your standard option for this beer it's not known to be the most attentive strain of yeast but I think it's gonna be alright we're not doing a starter because our OG is gonna be low enough that we can just pitch one straight packet of yeast without any issues you can choose to make starter if you want to it's only going to help you but I don't think it's necessary in this brew I'm going to do some water addition in this beer just to kind of make it a little bit nicer we are looking for a higher ratio of chloride to sulphate something along the lines of two to one chloride to sulfate this is going to bring out the multi flavors of the beer a bit more and it's going to taste more pleasant be aware if you flip this around and you do sulfates the chlorides you will have a drier feeling beer and it will have a little bit more hop bitterness so maybe tone down the hops if you choose to do that however it's not going to hurt your beer to have one or the other there's no right answer here with this one because it's a forgiving beer so if you are brand new and you don't do water chemistry yet totally fine I get it can be it can be kind of intimidating and it's not totally necessary to make a good beer with however it does help quite a bit I am doing 82 parts per million of calcium 10 parts per million of magnesium 65 parts per million of sodium 78 parts per million of sulfate 123 parts per million of chloride and 93 parts per million of carbonate now everyone's base water is going to be different so you do need to calculate your own additions of salts to add to this but I am adding four grams of gypsum two grams of Epsom two grams of calcium chloride and four grams of chalk to the brewing water so I have treated both my mash water and my strike water with these chemicals as well as adding a Camden tablet to the whole thing just to get rid of any sort of city chlorine compounds from the water because those can be pretty nasty in the final beer so now I'm waiting for my mash to get up to temp and pretty soon we'll be going in so I will catch you then alright so everything is up to temp and we're actually ready to go in now but I want to make a note that I have a system that's slightly different than what most people probably have my system will recirculate work throughout the entire mash this is not necessary it's just another step that I take to kind of maintain a little bit more clarity in the word and it kind of helps my final beer a little bit but I want to make a point that that's not necessary at all for this style so because of the recirculation I actually do in at my mash temperature because the mash temperature will fall and then come right back up to the intended temperature because of the recirculation now if you don't have a system like this and you're just working with like your standard Igloo cooler that's totally fine you're gonna make great beer with that just look up online a calculator or something where you can figure out what strike temperature you need to hit and then you can go in from there and be accurate with your temperatures so I'm going to go ahead and remove the recirculation piece of this and go in real quickly [Music] all right so now we want to make sure that we stir this real good make sure you don't have any dough balls or clumps in the mash there cuz that's gonna affect your efficiency I'll get that all distributed nicely alright so we're about ten minutes into the mash now so it means it's time to check the pH normally I just use these pH strips instead of an actual pH meter green that's just because I don't really have the budget for one of those right now that'll come eventually but for now these will do cuz they're just precise enough to get us in the right neighborhood I think we're actually about in the right area so pH is looking like it's somewhere between five and five point five which is where you want it in the mash so we're gonna go ahead and let that sit for the rest of the mass which is another hour oh right so the mash has been going for a full hour now so it's time to go ahead and start collecting all this work so I'm gonna start by turning off the heat turning off the pump I'm closing up all of our ball valves here [Music] all right so I got about seven gallons from my first runnings and we need a pre boil volume of about eight gallons in order for this to be a successful brew day so I'm gonna go ahead and batch sparge with about a gallon and a quarter of water this is a one quart dipper that I'm going to use to get this 170 degrees sparge water put into the grain bed here and I'm just batch barging this is what I normally do and it has worked out well for me always in the past [Music] alright and we'll let that sit for about another 10-15 minutes and let the sugars get rinsed off and then we'll go ahead and transfer the rest of these second runnings over alright so I just finished collecting my second running sorry I kind of forgot to film that but we have total of eight gallons in here right now so what I'm going to do now is go ahead and take the bag in the grain out of this kettle and clean it up and then we'll go ahead and transfer all of the work from here back into this kettle and then we'll start the boil [Music] [Music] okay I saw our pre-boiled gravity sample is in and it looks like it's about nine bricks which with my refractometer and a dark word corrects to about a pre-boiled gravity of about 1034 which is one point lower than we were aiming for with 10:35 as our estimated so that's pretty good sets us up for a reasonable boil alright so we just hit our boil so now it's time to add our bittering hops addition which is the 1.7 ounces of East Kent Golding's so in they go into the hop spider and now we literally just wait for another 50 there are five zero minutes until ten minutes are left in the boil in which case I'm gonna add some more stuff alright so we have now about 10 minutes left in the boil so I'm gonna go ahead and add my elected aroma Edition which is not normal in this beer at all but that's one ounce of East Kent Golding's going right into the hop spider I think I missed a little bit there so that's good the other thing that is very important I think in this style is some yeast nutrient I typically add this to every single beer and that's kind of just a guarantee that the yeast is going to have a little extra help in the fermentation but I'm adding two and a half teaspoons of that and I do that pretty much now with every single beer in this style we want it to finish really as dry as we can get it so that's gonna help contribute to that factor okay so now with ten minutes left in the boil like that and all that stuff as you saw earlier this is my plate chiller this is a very important piece of equipment that it allows me to tell the work very quickly I am going to start recirculating boiling work through this and that is going to sanitize the inside of it as well as the inside of the pump that I use to pump everything through this so we're gonna maintain that for the next 10 minutes through the boil basically this allows me to guarantee that the inside of this does not contain any live bacteria that's going to contaminate the beer so we're just going to start setting that up now [Music] every so often that happens okay so I've set my chilling system up where the work is going from the kettle to the pump to the chiller back into the kettle we're gonna start by opening up the valve here that's gonna prime the pump then we can pump from there back into the kettle we're gonna recirculate this for the next 10 minutes so not only is that going to sanitize the inside of all this equipment but that's also going to encourage the proteins and hop debris and any other sort of troub type things to coagulate in the center because I have this set at an angle so it's going to actually whirlpool the entire thing so that's going to help generate clearer work at into the fermenter at the end of this process well during the process I've actually transferred the wort into the fermenter my camera completely died so I lost all the footage that I had of actually aerating the wort and transferring it in there so basically aerating the work is very important for any beer style you typically want about an inch or two of foam on the surface of the work right before you pitch the yeast that is an indicator of dissolved oxygen in the work which is important for yeast health pre fermentation post fermentation oxygen is very bad we don't want that it decreases shelf-life of the beer basically but pre fermentation it's very important I did this by basically just holding my hose basically this far off the the word here and ensuring that it was splashing into the fermenter and just creating lots and lots of bubbles that's what we really want at the end of the day but here we have the actual oxygenated words and I put a fresh battery in the camera so now we have that [Music] okay so our original gravity is showing on my refractometer as about eleven and a half bricks which is equivalent to an original gravity of about one point zero four four which is two points lower than our expected original gravity which is pretty great so overall we hit our numbers more or less and we should expect a beer between four and five percent ABV by the time this is completely finished anyway it is time to pitch the yeast so I'm gonna go ahead and take this sanitized packet of Irish ale yeast from Y East here and open that up and we're pitching and now and now we'll cap that up we'll let that sit for a couple of weeks and catch up to you when fermentation is complete thereafter a rather frustrating fermentation the final gravity of the beer is parked at about 10:14 it's as low as it's gonna get despite a lot of trying to get it lower so we're gonna go ahead and kick it tonight all right so we are finally at the tasting section of this video and well so fermentation did not quite go as expected sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't this is one of those times that it didn't it took a long time to ferment out with this particular yeast which is strange because that's very much not the reputation that this yeast has typically people see Irish doubts from anything out in like a couple days mine took three weeks I don't know maybe the yeast wasn't super healthy so I could have made a starter in order to have a really good consistent you know issue free fermentation but I bought all those ingredients that morning so I didn't really have a time to actually make a starter but I think the yeast might have had something to do with that particularly high final gravity so we were definitely not shooting for a final gravity that high but that's okay it still tastes pretty good so I'm gonna go ahead and pour the beer now we'll talk about all right so I told this one March gladness which is kind of you know a spin-off of March Madness it comes in about 4% ABV and 34 IV use [Music] so the parents of the beer is pretty black it's got a dark tan head-on colors actually if you if you look deeply at the color you'll see it's actually a very dark brown not a jet black but that's actually the way that these Irish touts are supposed to be the head is pretty robust in the beer but it does fade after a little while but it does leave a good decent layer on the surface that does stick around for the life of the pint unfortunately I do not have this on a nitrous system because I do not have space nor money for a nitro system but it does pretty well on co2 anyway it's just not going to be as creamy and the head is definitely not going to be nearly as pillowy and awesome as a nitrous doubt would otherwise be as you can see it's a little over carbonated right now but in it's okay I'm just having some issues with my kegerator the lines are a little bit too long I think it's causing a lot of foam on some of my beers so for aroma it's got a real nice kind of coffee roast type aroma a little earthiness I think the East Kent Golding's that I added for aroma are coming through and kind of like an earthy musty kind of way Bri you know pretty English type of aroma there so not too pungent but that's it's okay it's you know not meant to be an overwhelming beer in terms of aroma so now we'll go in for a mouth filled it's got like a medium-bodied mouthfeel it's not as smooth and creamy as it would be if it was on nitro so it's not you know got a super thick mouthfeel like an imperial stout would you know it's not very heavy on alcohol so that definitely lends to not having a very big mouth feel it's not really a thin bodied mouthfeel either I mean it's very drinkable and it's got a very dry finish even though it didn't really have a dry final gravity there but now the flavor doesn't last very long in the mouth so it encourages you to take a larger sip um but the the overall mouthfeel definitely is medium I would say and not too not too aggressive it's not really yeah it's not creamy it's not chalky the minerals really come through it just kind of feels dry which it should all right now onto flavor so it's it's actually a little bit bitter I think there might be a little too much hot bittering in this a little aggressive on the bittering edition but the flavor does have a very pleasant roast and you know yeah I put a ton of roasted barley in this but it really does come through as as a smooth roast not an acrid roast it just blends really well there is a little bit of an acidic bite actually at first and I added the acid malt for that reason that's a characteristic of the beer i basing this off of and it comes through nicely it's not overpowering it's not harsh to drink at all it just kind of lends a little slightly acidic tinge to the whole thing select sourness not not like yeah it's not like a bacterial sour it's it's like just an acid sour you know not really don't really dig into that too much it's not really a very apparent thing until you're looking for it just kind of something that as a sharpness to the front it's other than that it's really pretty much just dominated by a good smooth coffee roast type flavor and there's actually a slight little bit of nuttiness coming through on the back like a hazelnut almost flavor which is really pleasant yeah I mean it tastes very clean for first out and it's quite simple I think it's very approachable you know it's it's definitely a it's not a heavy drinking beer it's a nice sessionable 4% and you can have a couple of these and feel fine so I really actually am pretty pleased with the way it turned out I do wish it had gotten a little drier I personally don't mind having a little bit of extra hot bitterness up front it might be a little too much for the style but I think I don't mind it personally so I did pour this thing kind of cold because in my Kizer I'm still lagering a doppelbock that's been sitting there for like two months now it's still going so all of my beers have been very cold as they're poured but as this warms up the flavor definitely changes a little bit it gets it gets a little bit fuller and you get a little bit more of the nuttiness I'm talking about on the back as it warms up and I think it actually it doesn't have as much of a sharp bite as much when it gets a little bit warmer to ideally this beer is actually served it'll rather low pressure and at a much warmer temperature something like fifty degrees Fahrenheit but that's alright you know it still tastes pretty good ones cold too don't get me wrong so anyway as far as the improvements on the beer I think I could definitely do with a little bit less hop bitterness upfront I think that's just a matter of dialing back that bittering up addition just a little tiny bit nothing wrong with that I keep the aroma edition I think that's nice as a nice the element to it that I definitely find welcome in this beer I think I would add a little extra flaked barley because that would boost the mouthfeel a little bit I think it's still the flaked barley is supposed to kind of add a smoothness to the mouthfeel and it didn't really come through and I also think I may not have converted to dull so maybe the next time I give myself a little bit longer mash rest perhaps but honestly like the biggest thing that would make this better would be having it on nitro plain and simple that just changes the character of this beer so much like if you've ever had a Guinness that's on co2 versus a Guinness that's on nitro it's like night and day so if you do have the ability to get a nitro system and a stout faucet it's I'd I envy you sir or ma'am because that is just such an awesome thing to have I don't have it yet but maybe in the future maybe I could pull that off but either way this is pretty solid for a co2 version of an Irish dad I'm gonna give it I'm gonna give it a healthy 8 out of 10 I think it's a pretty good execution of the style not the best it definitely needed to get lower in terms of final gravity it needed to finish drier but it didn't and well next time hopefully it will and that's a matter of just rebooting it and making sure I have a lot more yeast next time I think there's no like there's no off flavors in terms of under pitching it's not fruity it's not hot tasting so I definitely fermented like well it just didn't ferment the best that could have fermented so thanks for making it all the way to the end of the video if you're still watching I appreciate it if you really like this kind of stuff please give it a thumbs up it really helps my channel become a lot more relevant a thumbs up a subscribe and a comment all of those things really helped me out and I love actually talking with everybody so I honestly read every single comment that I get and I do my best to respond to as many of them as I can so please leave a comment down below and I'll get back to you yeah so I try to post a new video roughly every two to three weeks but that does depend on how fast I can brew and how fast I can get rid of beer that's in kegs but that's generally about the timeframe that I upload to youtube with however if you want more frequent updates on the order of every few days please feel free follow me on Instagram that's at the apartment Breuer on Instagram and there you'll see more frequent updates in real time and you can see what's going to be coming to the YouTube channel in a few weeks which is always exciting last but certainly not least if you want to breathe this beer for yourself there's a recipe in the description box down below that should be complete but also down there you'll find links to all of my equipment and where you can buy it on Amazon if you wish to do so just be advised that if you do buy something in Amazon using one of those links then I do earn a very small commission but it's at no additional cost to you and it's a great way to help support the channel so thank you very much for watching I hope you guys enjoyed the video and maybe you got something useful out of it maybe I inspired you to brew your own Irish step I know it's a little late to do that for st. Patty's Day 2020 but you know it's definitely a good beer to enjoy any time of year and speaking of which I'm gonna go ahead and finish off the rest of this well I'm actually brewing a English bitter right now so I'll get back to that but I will catch you guys in the next one Cheers [Music] you

Channel: TheApartmentBrewer

Views: 10,128

Rating: 4.9410028 out of 5

Keywords: craft, beer, home, brewing, home brewing, hops, hoppy, lager, ale, brew, BIAB, brew in a bag, all grain, how to brew, yeast, fermentation, apartment, brewer, grain, glass, grain to glass, IBU, mash, RIMS, HERMS, recirculating, electric, inkbird, homebrew, keg, Irish, Stout, Guiness, St Patricks Day, Roasted Barley, Roasty, Low ABV, East, Kent, Goldings, nitro, english, coffee, chocolate

Id: oJkedFgm0t0

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020