Minor Miracle Oatmeal Cream Stout

aka Breakfast of Champions

Ingredients (for 5 gallons)

Grains/Extracts Additives Hops Yeast
6 lb light DME 1 lb honey 2 oz Northern Brewer (bittering) WYeast 1084
(Irish Ale)
3 lb dark DME ½ lb lactose 1 oz Kent Goldings (aroma)
1 lb Gambrinus Honey Malt dextrose to prime
1 lb steel-cut oats
¼ lb roasted barley
¼ lb black patent malt

Procedure

Pseudo-mash specialty grains and oats in 1 gal water, 30 minutes at 160-180°. Strain and sparge into brewkettle, add DME and honey, boil 1 hour, add bittering hops, boil 1/2 hour, add armoa hops, boil 5 minutes. Cool, pitch yeast, etc.

Add the lactose at bottling time with the priming sugar. Lactose doesn't dissolve too well, so encourage it by making a syrup with it and the priming sugar and about 1 c water, simmered in a saucepan for 10 minutes then cooled.

OG FG Est. ETOH
1.13 1.02 11.5%(!)


Notes

The first time I made this, I pseudo-mashed the specialty grains first, sparged them into the brewkettle, and added the DME, oats and honey. This turned out to be a mistake; after cooling overnight, the oats had swelled up and stolen a bunch of my sugar; I had to rinse them and boil the result again. I added more honey (started with 10 oz and added 6 later) to bring up the OG, which was low. I wrote in my notes at the time: "If thsi stuff actually ends up tasting good, it'll be a minor miracle..." Well, it was great, which is why "minor miracle" ended up being its name, rather than "Land of Milk and Honey"...

The second time I did it, I used rolled oats instad of steel-cut and the OG was a bit lower. The recipe above is sort of an amalgam of the first two, which is what I plan to use next time!

This really is my best beer ever... it won 2nd place in a blind tasting against 10 commercial stouts (at a party Greg threw for my 35th birthday).



leighann@elfhill.com