Thursday, November 1, 2012

#23 - Cajunga Imperial Stout [All Grain]

I have not been blown away by any of the imperial stouts that I have had to date with each drink either being too syrupy or too watery. I wanted something that was somewhere in between in terms of body and flavour. 

I Made this beer with the intention of entering it in a local brewing competition but only got it bottled the week before and thought it was probably too young to be entering it. I tried it after a couple of weeks and it was surprisingly drinkable. I had never made an imperial stout before and had assumed that they took several months to become drinkable. This didn't seem to be the case as it was a bit 'ugh' after 1 week in the bottle but after 3 weeks it tasted really good! 

The recipe originally started off as an imperial porter as I love the additional emphasis on chocolate flavours that seem to be one of the few differences that I can identify between porters and stouts. The one issue is that imperial porters doesn't exist as a BJCP style and thus an imperial porter doesn't really fit in anywhere in brewing software. To make it fit I decided to put it into the imperial stout style but of course I wanted to make the "software indicators" fit within the style guidelines which caused me to increase the base grains and the roasted grain to compensate. I added the crystal malts as they were crushed and I didn't want to leave them lying around for too long. I would regard these as optional but given how well the final beer tastes I would be reluctant to leave them out in future in case the flavour suffered as a result. 

More hops were added than intended as I wanted to use up the full 100g bags (I hate having 10g of hops left over!). Also I have been recently paranoid that I haven't been getting good utilisation from my hops as the software thinks they are fresh when in fact they could be up to 2 years old, this also influenced the increased hopping rate. I saw Junga Hops on my local brewing supplier website and thought the name sounded cool so used them. They are a Polish Hop and are related to the Saaz hop variety. This is probably the wrong style of beer to showcase these hops as there is so much other stuff going on. The Junga hops were leaf and the cascade were in pellet form. The girlfriend had to give me a hand grinding the grain as my flimsy arms were incapable of grinding constantly. 
Grinding

I made a 1L starter with 3 days on a stir plate and pitched it at a warm 27 degrees. I have pitched at this temperature the last 2 or 3 brews and I haven't noticed any adverse affects. I mashed low at 150-151F to get a lighter body as I am not a fan of syrupy stouts. This was an all-day mash as I didn't have time to do everything in one day. I mashed in before I went to work and did the boil when I came home. 

Original gravity was 1088, final gravity 1016.

BeerSmith 2 Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com
Recipe: Imperial Cajunga Stout 
Brewer: Shane Phelan
Asst Brewer: 
Style: Imperial Stout
TYPE: All Grain
Taste: (30.0) 

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 25.34 l
Post Boil Volume: 22.71 l
Batch Size (fermenter): 19.00 l   
Bottling Volume: 17.00 l
Estimated OG: 1.083 SG
Estimated Color: 116.5 EBC
Estimated IBU: 67.2 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 60.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 69.0 %
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                     Type          #        %/IBU         
6000.00 g             Pale Malt, Maris Otter (5.9 EBC)         Grain         1        69.0 %        
1000.00 g             Wheat, Torrified (3.3 EBC)               Grain         2        11.5 %        
600.00 g              Black Malt (Stout) (1333.0 EBC)          Grain         3        6.9 %         
500.00 g              Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (78.8 EBC)    Grain         4        5.7 %         
500.00 g              Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (236.4 EBC)   Grain         5        5.7 %         
100.00 g              Chocolate Malt (1050.5 EBC)              Grain         6        1.1 %         
40.00 g               Junga [12.30 %] - Boil 60.0 min          Hop           7        42.6 IBUs     
30.00 g               Junga [12.30 %] - Boil 30.0 min          Hop           8        24.6 IBUs     
95.00 g               Cascade [5.50 %] - Boil 0.0 min          Hop           9        0.0 IBUs      
25.00 g               Junga [12.30 %] - Boil 0.0 min           Hop           10       0.0 IBUs      
1.0 pkg               California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) [35. Yeast         11       -             
115.00 g              Cascade [5.50 %] - Dry Hop 0.0 Days      Hop           12       0.0 IBUs      
Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Single Batch Sparge [Shanes AG]
Total Grain Weight: 8700.00 g
----------------------------
Name              Description                  Step Temperature       Step Time       
Mash Step         Add 19.50 l of water at 166. 152.0 F                60 min          
Sparge: Batch sparge with 2 steps (Drain mash tun, , 17.05l) of 168.1 F water


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