Coopers Stout with Oatmeal

[Garry]

The nights are drawing in and it has me drooling for a nice creamy silky pint of stout.

I've been thinking of doing a stout kit with oats but after some interweb research I've discovered that oats need to be mashed with a base grain to work properly or something. How hard can that be? So I suppose this is a mini-mash?

My objective is to have a really silky smooth creamy stout. I'm not looking for much bitterness or chocolate or coffee or anything else, just lots of body and that's why I'm experimenting with the oats.

I'm using Coppers original stout and a 1.5kg tin of LME.

For the oats I'm using 500g of porridge oats and I'm going to mash this with 500g of lager malt that I got from the recent MCI group buy. But I'd imagine that any base malt would do.

I weigh out my oats and malt and put these in a muslin bag.



I want to mash at 67C for 60min so I heat up 2.5L of water to 76C. Use an online mash calculater to figure this out.



I added the bag of grains to the pot and mixed them up with a potato masher. That's why it's called a mash right??



I checked the temperature at this stage and it should have been 67C. It wasn't, so I added some boiling water to bring it up. When the temperature was 67C, I covered the pot and insulated it with the wife's least favourite towels. I left this alone for an hour.



45min into the mash I put the cooper's tin and the LME tin in warm water to soften the extract.



55min into the mash, I warmed up 1L of sparge water to 78C.



I used this to sparge my grain. Note to self; use a bigger pot for the mash next time!





The oatmeal wort was then boiled for a few minutes to sterilise it.



I added the copper's extract and LME to my FV.



I then put my oatmeal wort into the tins and gave them a stir to get all that goop out of the tins and added this to the FV.



I topped up the FV to 20L with cold water. Stir like bejasuz for a few minutes to aerate the wort and pitch the yeast onto the foam head. I used the kit yeast and it was pitched at 23C.



My OG was 1.052 (my hydrometer is reading high).



I put the FV out in the garage and put on the heat belt. It was bubbling away nicely this morning.



I cleaned up and had a beer. I may have used her least favourite towels but I put them in the washing machine all by myself! I've learned the hard way



I plan to add 500g of lactose to the bottling bucket with the priming sugar to add even more body. I'll keep ye posted 

[LordEoin]

mmm brownies! 

[Seanboy]

Great post .. Let us know how it works out ......

[LordEoin]

Yeah, thanks Garry. I've been meaning to poke around partials a bit more

But this post is making me both hungry and thirsty.

[Danny(00833827)]

nice detailed post - thanks Garry!

[Garry]

There'll be ate-in and drinkin' in this one if it turns out right 

[LordEoin]

I opened one of this International Stout kit that I bottled a year ago (its birthday was yesterday) and it has all the qualities you're looking for. Smooth, creamy, lasting head.
If the oatmeal works out, it might save me some time in the future

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

Oatmeal will compromise your head retention. You might counter this with some wheat malt. I would also mash out at ~71C to fully convert starches and such.

I have done a stout with some oats additions, though probably not as big a grist as yours. I used 2 cans of LME as well, and a total of about 2.2 Kg of grain. Made a cracking porter with an OG of 1.052, and it finished out pretty low, for a nice belter of a tasty 5.6% stout. If I can keep the head on it, its a house beer.

[Garry]

Oatmeal will compromise your head retention. You might counter this with some wheat malt.

I've read that somewhere alright but I read somewhere else that the protein in the oats helps head? I'm not sure, we'll see how it goes. If the head is bad I could use 500g wheat DME and 500g of plain DME instead of the LME next time. I thought about adding wheat DME to the bottling bucket but I don't want to carbonate it too much, maybe just 1.5vols so I'd only be adding about 100g of DME. It's not worth it, I'll stick with sugar.

I plan to add 500g of lactose to the bottling bucket too so this should help the head retention.

I would also mash out at ~71C to fully convert starches and such.

Sorry, I don't understand what this means! Is mashing out different to sparging?

I have done a stout with some oats additions, though probably not as big a grist as yours. I used 2 cans of LME as well, and a total of about 2.2 Kg of grain. Made a cracking porter with an OG of 1.052, and it finished out pretty low, for a nice belter of a tasty 5.6% stout. If I can keep the head on it, its a house beer.

That's good to hear. Can you remember what your grain bill was? Was your stout a kit or extract?

I opened one of this International Stout kit that I bottled a year ago (its birthday was yesterday) and it has all the qualities you're looking for. Smooth, creamy, lasting head.
If the oatmeal works out, it might save me some time in the future

That's good to hear Eoin. I haven't tried this kit before but it sounds like a good base from what you say.

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

I've read that somewhere alright but I read somewhere else that the protein in the oats helps head? I'm not sure, we'll see how it goes. If the head is bad I could use 500g wheat DME and 500g of plain DME instead of the LME next time. I thought about adding wheat DME to the bottling bucket but I don't want to carbonate it too much.

Wheat DME in the bottling bucket is a great way to boost the head. I always add about 2-3% wheat malt into the grist of everything to boost it. There is a bit more research to be done on what oatmeal does to the head. My stout (recipe below) had almost no head retention. I have made small batch pale ales with 20% oatmeal, that had great head (but were totally cloudy).

Sorry, I don't understand what this means! Is mashing out different to sparging?

My understanding of it, is Mashing Out, raises the mash temp up to a level where all the starches can be converted (eliminates haze). This also loosens the grain a bit, making for a more effective sparge. So they are two processes. I BIAB, so I dont have any hands on familiarity with the various sparge processes.

That's good to hear. Can you remember what your grain bill was? Was your stout a kit or extract?

Partial Mash: http://thesumofallbeers.tumblr.com/post/52819251539/scraping-the-bag-extract-porter - the name refers to using up all the base malt in the house, before my next resupply.

[mr hoppy]

The enzymes that convert dextrins into simple sugars in malt stop working once the temperature of the mash gets significantly over 70 degrees. The idea of mashing out is to stop the enzymes so that the dextrins in the malt aren't broken down any further and the beer doesn't end up drier than intended.

If you're sparging with 75 degree plus water pretty much straight away it's not going to make a big difference from that perspective.

However, it is also true that heating things up makes run off easier - but there's a balance to be struck. I went on the hot side with the witbier I brought to the last Rebel Brewer meet and it ended up finishing too high and being sweeter and heavier than intended.

[Billythegypsy]

I must have been subconsciously thinking about this post today!

I've done something very similar.

I mashed the oatmeal 400g and base malt 400g in my slow cooker at 68c for 40 minutes.

I then boiled it with 1kg of dark dme and 1kg of wheat extract for about 15-20 mins. (I only tossed the wheat in for the craic, it went out of date in July)

I lobbed in 500g of lactose as the boil finished.

I combined this with a tin of Coopers Stout and an oogely boo of vanilla extract.

[Garry]

Good man Billy, sounds nice.

That will be rocket fuel with 2kg of DME, what OG did you get? The lactose will probably bring up the OG a fair bit too but it won't ferment out. I didn't put the lactose in yet, I'm waiting until I bottle it.

How much vanilla did you add, I can't find my oogely boo to metric converter 

[Billythegypsy]

The OG came in at 1.065 but it was actually wee bit more. After I checked the og, I noticed a layer of syrup from the Coopers kit lying on the bottom and stirred it up 

As for vanilla extract, I used 4-6 cap fulls. 

BTW, I used Nottingham Ale yeast for this, kindly donated by Brenmurph.

[LordEoin]

you might want to double check that extract and make sure it's water based.
I used a lemon extract once before realising it was oil based. What a mess...