Today is another exciting day for us at Blue Pants. We are brewing our first Imperial Stout which will be aged in Bourbon Barrels. We've kept pretty quiet about this one so far because it will still be quite a while before it's ready for release, but since I like writing about new beers so much, I figured I'd go ahead and offer a bit of a teaser.
The idea for this beer came about almost as a matter of necessity. We need to fill our Bourbon Barrels that previously held Wee Heavy so that they don't dry out. In the past, we have brewed Pinstripe for aging in barrels with mixed success. Our first year brewing bourbon barrel Pinstripe, we had some great beer come out of the barrels, but the beer didn't seem to support all the bourbon flavor. We actually had to blend the barrel aged beer with a pretty significant portion of non-barrel aged beer in order to make it seem balanced. Last year, we had our first barrel contamination and we lost our entire batch of Bourbon Barrel Pinstripe (which would have been released this year). As a result, we started thinking about what we could use the barrels for. Originally, I wanted to rinse them and brew a stout fermented with Brettanomyces in them, but it would have been a bit of a waste of bourbon, since there is still a significant amount left in the barrels. Mike and I had talked about brewing an Imperial Stout several times over the last two years, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
The exciting thing for me about this beer is that it gives us another opportunity to show off very high quality English malts. After seeing how much people appreciated the complex malty flavors of the Chocolate Oatmeal Porter, I wanted to follow that up with another malty beer that will feature the highest quality malts available.
Once again, we will be featuring Floor-Malted Maris Otter as the base malt. What a lot of people don't realize is that American 2-row is typically a blend of barley varieties that get malted together. The reason for doing so is because maltsters can blend different varieties together in order to creat consistent batches of malt from year to year. But what we end up with is a pretty bland base malt which doesn't provide much character to the beer. Maris Otter, on the other hand, is a specific type of 2-row barley grown in England and it is known for having a more intense malty flavor than most other base malts with a little bit of a toast character to it... When ordering Maris Otter malt, what you receive is not a blend of 2-row, but just Maris Otter by itself. When using floor malted ingredients, the malty flavors are even more pronounced. This was the same type of base malt we used in the Chocolate Oatmeal Porter.
In addition to the Maris Otter, we will be using English Crystal Malt which provides a toffee like sweetness without the sugary-candylike sweetness associated with American Caramel Malts which result in a cloying mouthfeel in high gravity beers. We will also feature a blend of Chocolate Malts (this time we are using more Pale Chocolate Malt to try to avoid the roast astringency of regular Chocolate Malt). In an effort to make the beer pitch black, we will be using a debittered black malt which will make the beer black, but will induce white foam. Lastly, we will be using Flaked Barley to add body and head retention thanks to their high amount of beta-glucans.
When brewing high gravity beers like this, I typically use a low mash temperature so that the beer will not be overly thick, but since we are aging in a bourbon barrel, I do want the beer to have a lot of body to support the bourbon and oak flavors. So instead of my typical low mash temperature, we went with a medium 154 degrees. Also, my normal philosophy is to use a yeast with a lot of character, but with a high gravity fermentation, there will be plenty of esters produced using a more neutral ale yeast, so instead of London Ale yeast like I normally would, we are using American Ale yeast which is a bit more robust.
What we will wind up with is a base beer at about 11% ABV before going into the barrels. The beer should be completely black with a long lasting off-white head, and with 50 IBU's should have a low apparent bitterness. Now just give us about a year before you get to sample it!
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