2nd ever brew day - aiming a tad high

[Joe Cal]

for my second ever brew day my fiance is out of the house. i don't know when i'll get an opportunity like this again so even at this formative stage of my new favourite hobby / obsession i've decided to go all out with a very advanced recipe for a very difficult style. A Russian Imperial Stout.

As a base I used an Old Rasputin clone recipe ... I've never tasted this beer ...

I substituted certain ingredients as most supply pack sizes i've bought are aimed at 23 litre batches but i'm doing 4.5. in a way this is why i feel brave enough to experiment with this advanced recipe. for pale malt i use maris otter (1.27kg) , carastan malt > munich (91g), brown malt> carafa 3 (45g), i use the correct chocolate (45g), crystal (91g) and roasted black barley (23g).

90min boil, cluster hops>magnum (16g @60), centennial>cascade (6g @2) and northern brewer (6g @2) i have. obviously this is going to be very different to the original but i'm aiming more to keep the style / spirit. everything is scaled down for my set up.

No sooner shall this be cooled, aerated, moved to fermenter and yeast pitched than i'll be moving on to part 2. that's right, i'm ambitious / foolhardy. during the week i had watched a youtube video of a homebrew russian imperial, in the video the grains are re-mashed for a dry stout. as i have the day to myself and minimum spending money (saving for the wedding) i've decided i'd try it. i did a little internet research and found that doing this is a thing. to keep it from being too bitter i'll add 30g maris otter and 10g roast barley to freshen it up for the second mash. I'm also going to add 2 40g packets of flahavans quick oats to the mash. this one will be a 60 min boil with one 7g addition of magnum at 60min and 60g of black treacle with 5 mins left. At 0 mins I'll add 30g of coffee beans

fiance isn't back til late tomorrow so i plan a bastardized sierra nevada pale ale clone. i probably seem quite mad, this new hobby has taken me completely as a shock but while in the first flush of this i want to go full tilt and learn all i can. my adventures last saturday gave me some tips and i'm sure i'll learn a lot more today

[Qs]

Haha good going. How much yeast are you pitching for the RIS?

[Joe Cal]

i was gonna use 8grams of Danstar Nottingham beer yeast rehydrated but i diluted the wort too much by adding water and the og was 1.046 so i only used 4 grams. still going ahead with the second drink now

[Qs]

Pity about the RIS. Supposed to be tricky to ferment though so maybe for the best.

Whens the wedding. I'm getting married soon too and I also brewed today!

[Joe Cal]

may 28th next year, so plenty of time. i'll have my RIS right by that stage 

[Jonnycheech]

Are you mashing and sparging the grain? Do you mind me asking how did you over dilute the batch? Was your efficiency low and you sparged too much?

Yeah it's better to have a bigger starter when doing a big beer, the yeasties need their mates in to help out with the extra work. Also aeration is pretty important, pure O2 is handy if you got it. A second blast of this after initial yeast take off doesn't hurt either. With the biggies it's good to move to secondary and allow more time conditioning than you would a standardish OG beer.

Be careful not to over dilute the second runnings, I have done this before and ended up with a piss weak stout that I ended up throwing as it was just too light. It was a waste of time drinking it, the taste was there but the body was anorexic supermodel thin.

[Joe Cal]

i was mashing and sparging, yeah. i got greedy, near the end of the boil so much had been evaporated, so i added 3 litres of boiled and cooled water. i think i have a fairly decent efficiency but i was thinking of the second runnings brew so didn't want to over sparge. turned out to be a waste because just like yours the second batch got dumped. i went the whole way through the boil and everything. checked the og it was like 1.02 and i had a taste, it was full of tannins (i'm guessing that its tannins, it tasted really nasty) so i dumped it. had no money and no interest in  the steven gerrard love in and i had a fermenter waiting so i had another shot at the RIS recipe. i am completely sick of brewing now but i'm after hitting an og of 1.09 which pleases me no end.

also because of all i've been doing i had wort for a yeast starter. before i put it in the the fermenter and after it had cooled i used a sterilised hand whisk for 5 minutes to try and manually aerate it

[Joe Cal]

this has turned out really nice. i've done 13 brews now and tasted 10 and this is by far the best.
i tasted it after 2 weeks in the bottle and it was poison. i was worried i'd have to throw it out. but i just waited and 1.5 months in the bottle now i absolutely love it. so pleased 

gonna keep the bottles i have left and have one every month, get an idea of how well it ages and when the sweet spot is. i'm not very patient but i'll just have to learn