Seymour Chocolate Milk Stout

[seymour]

I'm interested in your home roasted brown malt - how did you do this? What temp and for what time?

It's so insanely easy you won't believe it. I've posted about it several times, here are some links so I don't have to retype it.
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=54367&hilit=home+r ... 15#p578899
This time I simply placed it dry on a little baking sheet in my toaster oven until it smelled really roasty. I highly recommend experimenting with this. Think about it, if you just need a small quantity of a dark crystal, brown, chocolate, black patent, etc, you can approximate it by toasting up your own from some base malt, instead of buying a stale store-bought pack and letting the rest get even staler until next time. Several guys have taken me up on it and have been pleased.

[Lugsy]

I've said it before, I think sours are the new IPAs. By that I mean, the insane balls-to-the-walls experimentation that craft brewers have done with IPAs for the last decade or so is just getting so tired and same-y (apparently more so here, I've been informed you guys didn't get all the crazy new US and NZ hops until more recently, not to mention the UK brewing industry is more conservative and traditional to begin with...)

That's a very good point. Over here we've only had access to the sort of hop-bombs you're talking about for the last few years and so many of the experimental brewers are going on these lines at the moment. A few have progressed beyond this but the UK is still a good few years behind you Americans for now. I'm lucky (although I cursed my misfortune to begin with) in that my local water (high carbonate) is unsuitable for highly hopped pales so I started playing around with other styles to come up with something I couldn't readily buy to satisfy my desire for different beer. I found that I can do a half-decent Saison or Hefeweizen so I started to experiment with those styles instead.

Many of us are allowing some or all of our wort to open ferment outdoors, which is a huge gamble, but occasionally delicious. Or we rack our unfermented wort into discarded wine barrels to ferment via whatever survived in the wood. We'll dispose the gross stuff and keep combining the successful batches as we go along. Many of us, commercial brewers included, will save the dregs of any sour beer which tasted good, and repitch. There is some overlap with Kombucha brewing, which involves a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). Homebrewers led the way with this too, and I've already seen some commercial beer hybrids http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/lambrucha/119564/2682/
Anyway, it's an area ripe for endless experimentation, if your palate can handle wild/sour fermentations. Like I said, you're throwing away your spent grains anyway, why not run some extra water through it once more and see what you get. If you're even mildly interested, it costs nothing this way. On one hand, this is all radical and wildly ambitious; on the other hand, it's a logical back-to-the-basics farmhouse brewing practice which was the only possible way to brew for thousands of years, right?

Again, the majority of UK brewers are worried about letting loose these organisms into our breweries so we don't tend to do the experimentation that you talk of - the idea of spending all day making a beer on the off-chance that we might come up with something drinkable for all of our efforts (rather than something safer and guaranteed) is truly a terrifying prospect! I love the idea of brewing a small beer from the spent grains and so I will follow your lead on this one with my next brew - a highly smoked wheat beer grain bill with acidulated malt and some WLP653 Brettanomyces Lambicus. I'll throw in the dregs from anything promising over the next couple of months and see what happens. Many thanks for the advice on the balls-out attitude

[jmc]

How's your Chocolate Milk Stout & 'small' beer coming along?

[seymour]

How's your Chocolate Milk Stout & 'small' beer coming along?

Well, yesterday was Thanksgiving, so I tapped the mini-keg. It had only been filled three or four days earlier, and I don't have a C02 dispenser (yet...hopefully), so it was almost completely flat. First thoughts: it's definitely not a stout, I should've included some roasted barley if I wanted to call it a stout. It was a really nice, hazy, deep reddish brown ale, though, and the aforementioned chocolate milk and coffee-with-sugar-and-cream comparisons were accurate. Four or five relatives drank half-pints of it, and were all complimentary. My brother-in-law who is also a brewer, and lived and brewed in Southern England for awhile, said it struck him as an English strong mild: yeasty, young, dark and cloudy but not opaque black, bready, fruity, chewy, lots of residual sweetness, low carbonation. I consider that a good thing.

I didn't personally enjoy it as much as I'd hoped, but we had some phenomenal commercial beers to share in the meantime, so I was fine. I predict mine will be delicious in 2-3 weeks with some carbonation and time to tone-down the rough-around-the-edges yeast aspects. At that time, I'll measure the FG and take a picture.

The sour small beer is still burping the airlock about once every other second! I'll let it run its course before measuring the gravity and bottling it up. I'll keep you posted. At this point, I'm more excited about that one!

[Trefoyl]

Not to keep this thread off topic but I love the sours that are coming out. Like you said, I think they are the new IPA When the weather gets warmer I'll have to try to make one. http://www.themadfermentationist.com/ has been experimenting for years and is a very interesting blog to read.
Back to milk stout, this one was amazing! http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/13371/54620 Like a chocolate malted milkshake for grown ups!! I hope I get to have it again.

[seymour]

...http://www.themadfermentationist.com/ has been experimenting for years and is a very interesting blog to read...

I wholeheartedly agree. I first discovered him through Ratebeer.com, he's pretty active on the homebrew forum there and is always knowledgeable and helpful.

[seymour]

[gnutz2]

C'mon then, whats it taste like Bit early though.

[seymour]

C'mon then, whats it taste like Bit early though.

Still a bit sweet to me, but within the style guidelines. I said it before, it really does taste like chocolate milk, and coffee with cream and sugar. I got hotter esters and fusels than I'm used to, but they're reduced each time I taste it. People warned me how much trouble Windsor is, but that eventually it's just right, so maybe I'm still waiting for that sweet spot. Also, I'm pretty sure if I brew this again, I'll use half as much lactose, add a very low quantity of roasted barley, and ferment with a higher attenuating English ale yeast.

[seymour]

UPDATE: I filled a couple mini-kegs for Thanksgiving. One got drank, the other is still untapped. I left the remainder to "bulk-age" in the fermentator, hoping the final gravity would drop. Last weekend I measured it at 1.024, which is a bit lower than it was, too sweet for my taste, but as I said, just barely within style guidelines. A full pound of lactose was too much.

On the other hand, the sour second-runnings are dreamy. Even without carbonation I can tell this is something special. The blend of Duvel yeast and wild cultures fermented it to essentially the gravity of water, but it somehow still has a certain bready mouthfeel to it, which I can't explain. I've never had a toasty, chocolatey, sour beer before, maybe a stout with a funky Belgian yeast was as close as I got before. I highly recommend the combo to any adventurous brewers. I didn't use any temperature control, simply pitched at the warm end of the spectrum and let it drop ambiently. Once it equalized, my basement hovered around 10-16°C, so it was never really hot enough to get profoundly sour (lactobacilus thrives in the 30-40s.) However, it certainly has a subtle lacto bite, the familiar tart taste of yogurt. Delicious.

OG) 1.048
FG) 1.001
Attenuation) 98%! (versus the Windsor batch which was only 61%, mainly because of the unfermentable milk sugar)
ABV) 6.2%

I bottled that batch too. I'll have to hide a few from myself for aging, cuz this is gonna go fast.

If nothing else, hopefully I've given people a possible "Plan-B" approach. I was displeased with my main batch, but it wasn't a total loss, waste of time, etc, because separately I've got about 30 really tasty bottles that didn't cost anything. I didn't get a perfect Chocolate Milk Stout, but I definitely got something new.

[Trefoyl]

Fascinating. A new NJ brewery has a dry milk stout. They're an hour away from me though, so I haven't been able to try it, or very many of their other beers. When their beer goes on tap at growler stations near me it kicks so fast and there's me last in line with my tongue hanging out, and an empty growler

They just did a lacto-rest on their milk stout but they are serving it at one event only and I don't think I'll be able to make it.

The Sunday before Sandy made landfall in our town, we were playing around on the tippy with a soured version of Carton of Milk Stout. We mashed, ran off, and left it for a 2 day lactic rest, intending to boil it on the Tuesday morning Sandy came crashing into our lives. As it went, the brewery ended up without power with an average temperature of 40 degrees. When we got back in and got power, we decided to go ahead and boil the now 7 day soured wort and see what happened. 3 yeast pitches later we have 2 sixtels of a pretty cool, never reproducible 5% sour milk stout.

[seymour]

Oh yeah, that does sound like something really unusual. Let me know if you somehow get to taste it.

[jmc]

And now for something truly different:

I've been experimenting lately with making sour small beers from my spent-grains. I mean, why not? It's being disposed either way. This time, I let my spent Chocolate Milk Stout mash tun "ripen" for three days. Reminder: it contained a small percentage of aciduated malt to hasten the souring. I then added a few hops to the mash tun, sparged again with 3 US gallons (11.3 L), stirred-in 2 lbs golden brown cane sugar to OG 1.048. No boil.

Finally--and this is the really crazy part--I pitched dregs from a mate's delicious wild fermented beer, plus dregs from my seriously sour Imperial Berliner Weiss, plus a wild yeast I cultured from Bulgarian juniper berries, plus a small Duvel bottle culture. It's a whole zoo of microorganisms, but I'm very excited to taste this experiment in a month or so.

UPDATE: .....

On the other hand, the sour second-runnings are dreamy. Even without carbonation I can tell this is something special. The blend of Duvel yeast and wild cultures fermented it to essentially the gravity of water, but it somehow still has a certain bready mouthfeel to it, which I can't explain. I've never had a toasty, chocolatey, sour beer before, maybe a stout with a funky Belgian yeast was as close as I got before. I highly recommend the combo to any adventurous brewers. I didn't use any temperature control, simply pitched at the warm end of the spectrum and let it drop ambiently. Once it equalized, my basement hovered around 10-16°C, so it was never really hot enough to get profoundly sour (lactobacilus thrives in the 30-40s.) However, it certainly has a subtle lacto bite, the familiar tart taste of yogurt. Delicious.

OG) 1.048
FG) 1.001
Attenuation) 98%! (versus the Windsor batch which was only 61%, mainly because of the unfermentable milk sugar)
ABV) 6.2%

I bottled that batch too. I'll have to hide a few from myself for aging, cuz this is gonna go fast.

If nothing else, hopefully I've given people a possible "Plan-B" approach. I was displeased with my main batch, but it wasn't a total loss, waste of time, etc, because separately I've got about 30 really tasty bottles that didn't cost anything. I didn't get a perfect Chocolate Milk Stout, but I definitely got something new.

This sounds great.

Sorry about all questions below..

When you let the mash tun 'ripen' was it closed or open to the elements?

Would there be any chance of this ripening malt resulting in a permanent 'infection' of wild yeasts / lactobacillus in a cool-box mash tun?

Any idea what % of sugar was from the added 2 lbs golden brown cane sugar?

I assume the cane-sugar formed the majority of the sugars in the brew. With highly fermentable wort mainly simple sugars and a zoo of microorganisms, I'm not suprosed you got 98% attenuation..

[Trefoyl]

This article explains why the mash needs to be kept sealed:
http://www.byo.com/stories/techniques/a ... techniques
I haven't attempted any sours myself.

[jmc]

This article explains why the mash needs to be kept sealed:
http://www.byo.com/stories/techniques/a ... techniques
I haven't attempted any sours myself.

Interesting article. Thanks