Mackeson-ish Stout

[bitter_dave]

Hi everyone,

I'm quite a fan of Mackeson Stout as a fairly tasty low abv beer (around 3%), although it comes in annoying sized small cans. From reading Wheeler's European book, and Protz's 1000 beers book it seems to be pale malt, chocolate malt, non-fermentable lactose, and caramel for colour. Fairly modest bittering of about 26 IBUs.

Anyway, I thought it might lend itself quite nicely to a customised kit beer; something like this (using some info from Wheeler's AG/extract recipe):

1 x modestly hopped golden/pale ale can/sachet (1.5 to 1.8 kg)
500g of Pale Dried Malt Extract
500g of Chocolate Malt
500g of Lactose
Brupaks Brewers caramel to adjust colour (not sure how much)
Dried Yeast (from kit or Liberty Bell?)

I thought the following might work:
1) Steep chocolate malt in about 5 litres of water at 60-70 C for half an hour
2) Remove grains from liquid and rinse in large sieve a bit to get remaining extract out
3) Add kit, DME and lactose to the pan and stir to mix, bring to boil. Turn off.
4) Add contents to the fermenter, fill up to 23 litres. Add caramel.
5) Ferment at about 19 C
6) Stick in king keg

The final gravity would be fairly high because of the Lactose (Wheeler's recipe prediced 1020), so hopefully you should get a fairly full-bodied beer at about 3%-ish.

Any suggestions for a kit to use? Any caramel-related tips? Anyone tried anything like this or have any other tips/ suggestions for changes?

I've not made beer like this before, although one of wheeler's books suggests making stout using a lager kit as a base + roasted grains so I don't think it is crazy!

[bitter_dave]

Update: done a bit of googling Coopers Australian Pale Ale might be a good match for this it seems. 25 IBUs when made up to 23 litres - almost bang on in terms of bitterness. 1.7 kg in a can.

[bitter_dave]

Well, I’ve bought the ingredients for my experiment, so I’ll let you know how I get on, in case there are any other fans of low abv milk stout!

I had the yeast already, which I may or may not use as supposed to work on sweet stouts