Stouts & Grains

Since I have to keep the cycle of beer going, it was time to brew again the other night. I had a chocolate stout recipe and ingredients that had been laying around, which I'd bought on sale a while ago. It was  tried and tested recipe by the people at beer-wine.com, so not too much of my own creative input went into the recipe.

Now I have a bit of history with chocolate stouts. Both recently, and about 5 years ago (when I first tried brewing), the wort boiled over the pot, leaving a sticky mess of malt over my stove to clean up. It's never happened with any other brews. However, chocolate stouts have it out for me. You'd think I would have learned after the first time, but nope... the score currently stands at Ryan: 0, Chocolate Stouts: 2.

Hence I was especially careful this time to ensure my victory over a chocolate stout. I kept the boil temperature on the low end while checking on the wort frequently, which led to an unscathed brewing session this time.

Now interesting about this recipe is the use of grains; which I don't have an extensive knowledge of yet. If you take a look at my previous experimental recipe, it's all malt extract and lacks any full grains. However, take a look at the grains used in the chocolate stout below. Tons. In fact, the use of chocolate malt is what defines the chocolate stout.

There's a couple of reasons I've stuck to malt extracts with my own recipes so far. The main one is that I wanted to start simple, and expand my knowledge from there. The other main reason is I do not yet have a grain mill, so I use a caveman method to crush the grains, as depicted below.

My hi-tech method

I put the grains in a plastic ziplock and use the wooden block to repeatedly roll over the grains until the grains look crushed, or my arms give up. If I owned a rolling pin, that would be a good solution as well; but I've been looking into buying a grain mill at some point soon. The problem is all of the half decent ones are quite expensive, so I'll have to research thoroughly before purchasing.

Anyways, I think in future recipes of my own, I'll start to incorporate more grains for a more complex and interesting beer. One that might be quite cool to try is some smoky grains, so I end up with something along the lines of a rauchbier. We'll see though!