I have been brewing beer for a few months and I want to try to do something special for my wife. She has told me for years about her trip to Ireland and how great the Guinness beer is there. My wife does not even like most beer and thinks that the import Guinness taste’s too bitter and too thick and the head is not creamy enough. I have never had the pleasure of a trip to Ireland but I would love to make the beer she remembers, I am not quite up to doing an all grain brew yet but I would love to here if anyone knows a good recipe using extract and steeping grains that can make a beer close to what my wife remembers. I have found one or two recipes that say they will make this beer but there is nothing like hearing form folks that have made and tasted the beer. Thank you all for any advice you can give.
Irish stout is an easy recipe. Basically it is just 70% pale malt, 20% flaked barley and 10% roasted barley with about 30-50 IBUs of a bittering addition only. The problem will be two fold: One, you will need to do a mini-mash with the Flaked Barley (might not be much of a problem, pretty easy to mash a couple pound of grain) and , two, you are not going to be able to serve the Stout “properly” without either a beer engine or a nitrous, Co2 mix (beer gas) with Stout Faucet. This gives the beer its creamy, long lasting head and it will be hard to achieve this with bottle conditioning or with a simple keg set-up.
That said, you can still make a really nice dry stout following those guidelines. Another thing you might consider is the Guinness “widget” cans. They have a small widget inside the cans that releases nitrous into the beer and simulates that creamy, cascading effect that you get when serving beer on tap through a proper faucet. 20 bucks for an 18 pack at costco.
Thanks for the advice! I will give the beer a try without the nitrous and see how it comes out. I have never done any kind of mash before. Wish me luck
I make a dry stout and have no beer gas or stout faucet.
Sometimes I’ll take one of those meat injector syringes, put it
in the glass of beer suck up some beer and while holding the tip near the bottom of the glass
squirt it back into the glass. Knocks out some of the carbonation
and gives that cascading foam effect. I don’t remember where I picked up
this trick.
Guinness used to come packaged with a syringe to do just that trick. It’s been related on the internet many times, so maybe you saw it there somewhere. Also, if you simply overcarb your beer you will achieve the same effect. The high carbonation will form a dense cascading head, and the higher pressure will knock some carbonation out of your beer, leaving the “smooth” Guinness mouthfeel.
I dunno - I have obercarbbed many a beer and it isn’t the same to me. I know what you are talking about but there is a substantial difference to my taste. You can get the cascade effect though that is for sure.
