I’m convinced my heavy fake Belgian is the greatest beer in the universe, so now I feel encouraged to make a second heavy beer. I have a stout I completely love. Sort of like Murphy’s, but the FG is something like 1.015. I’m thinking I may just use more of everything to get a big OG, bump the bitterness up slightly, and maybe increase the crystal malt a bit. Sound like a plan?
Also, CO2 or beer gas? I love Old Rasputin, which is a CO2 beer, but I use beer gas for the only stout I make.
I would increase the base base malt disproportionally
This is a quote from Brewing Classic Styles: “The specialty grains remain the same; it is only the base malt and hop bittering that changes. Many new brewers mistakenly think it is necessary to increase the level of specialty malts when making a higher-alcohol beer. That is incorrect, and doing so will make an over-the-top version of the beer.”
Feel free to use or not use that advice as you see fit.
Which my experience tells me isn’t the way I want to do it. Gordon’s approach may work for some people, but it’s not the only way.
Or Jamil and John Palmer…but I agree there are many ways to do this, depending on the specific style involved.
If I hadn’t tried the base malt only approach, I might agree with them. But I didn’t get the results I wanted or expected by doing that. It makes more sense to me to keep the relative % constant. I encourage people to try both ways themselves.
So the definitive answer is yes but also no.
Let’s see. The volume stays the same. I use roasted and chocolate malt to bring the color and stouty flavor. They seem to work well with my existing stout, but does that mean they’re enough for an imperial? Maybe not.
I think Old Rasputin is fantastic. I don’t want to clone it, though, because I want something similar to my old stout, only high-gravity. The web says Old Rasputin comes in at 75 IBU’s. My recipe hits about 45, but both beers seem appropriately bitter. I don’t think of Old Rasputin as being more bitter. Maybe you have to jack up the hops when you jack up the malt, in order for the bitterness to seem similar. The only thing in my recipe that contributes sweetness is Munich malt.
The grain bill, which got me to 1.054, looks like this:
4.0 oz Rice Hulls (0.0 SRM)
5 lbs Pale Malt, Maris Otter
1 lbs 8.0 oz Oats, Flaked
1 lbs Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)
8.0 oz Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM)
8.0 oz Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM)
8.0 oz Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM)
Beersmith’s adjustment tool gives this for 1.084:
7.2 oz Rice Hulls (0.0 SRM)
9 lbs Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM)
2 lbs 11.1 oz Oats, Flaked (1.0 SRM)
1 lbs 12.7 oz Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)
14.4 oz Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM)
14.4 oz Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM)
14.4 oz Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM)
Beersmith thinks 8.4% ABV, which would be fine.
Maybe I should try this and increase the hopping, and if the resulting stout is messed up, I can play around with next batch.
Looks like the yeast I use, US-05, is commonly used in imperial stout.
Don’t forget about the sweetness from alcohol in a high gravity beer. And you might consider BRY97 instead of 05.
Thanks for those tips. So I can shoot for 75 IBU, since it works with Old Rasputin, and if it’s wrong, one more thing to adjust. I am reluctant to increase the ratio of dark grain just yet, but maybe I’m wrong.
Is Bry-97 less likely to fail me than US-05? I want to make sure the fermentation doesn’t die.
It’s not so much that as better flavor IMO. Neither one will have any issues if you use 2 packs. Increasing dark grains is up to you, although I would. Whatever you do, don’t cold steep. add them late, or use carafa. Not the right kind of beer for that. For my 100th batch (many years ago), I brewed a OR “homage” recipe by Bill Pierce of Brews & Views fame. It was very good, but I’ll be damned if I can find it now. I’ll keep looking.
You would want to increase IBUs for the higher gravity: the additional sweetness needs that balance IMO.
There’s an Old Rasputin recipe found in the July/August 2007 Zymurgy that I always thought looked interesting. I always wanted to try a reiterative mash with it but never did.
The Best of BYO magazine’s 250 Classic Clone Recipes has an extremely similar recipe which seems to corroborate the account.
Again, feel free to ck it out or not. Your call. Have fun!
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were talking about the way you want to do it. I thought the OP was looking for various points of view.
So, I gave BCS’s (which is not Gordon’s approach btw). …though they do have similarities I suppose.
I absolutely didn’t intend to imply it was the only way which is exactly why I included the caveat to feel free to disregard the advice.
Cheers!
And mine was one of “various”. It’s possible that the OR recipe in Zymurgy is Bill’s.
This is a lot of input, so considerable study and practical research will be needed. I should probably have a stout right now.
My stout is 5% caraaroma, 5% roasted barley, 5% chocolate malt and 85% simpsons golden promise, OG 1.050, 25 IBUs. When I tried to “imperialize” this recipe by increasing everything proportionally but to a higher ABV, (as well as more IBU’s) the malt character was all out of wack, way to caramelly sweet, too much roast)
I scale my recipes by percentages. I haven’t done side-by-side experiments but I get the impression that if I’m increasing the base malt, I do want to increase the other malts accordingly. Call it a hunch at this point, but this is how I do my big beers. Especially stouts or black beers where adding more doesn’t seem to really hurt anything and probably only helps.
I don’t know if it’ll give you the character you’re looking for, but Pattinson has documented lots of big stouts that include 10-20% sugar (typically, various English invert sugars) to boost the ABV.
Here’s an example from The Homebrewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer:
1924 Barclay Perkins IBS Ex
Mild malt 12.00 lb (5.4 kg) 53.33%
Amber malt 3.75 lb (1.7 kg) 16.67%
Brown malt 2.75 lb (1.2 kg) 12.22%
Black malt 1.50 lb (680 g) 6.67%
No. 2 invert sugar 2.50 lb (1.1 kg) 11.11%
Golding 90 min 5.50 oz (156 g)
Golding 60 min 5.50 oz (156 g)
Golding 30 min 5.25 oz (149 g)
OG 1103
FG 1040
ABV 8.33
Same way I think, Dave. If I was formulating a recipe from scratch, I’d use %. Why not when scaling up?
When I scale up/down a recipe in my brewing software of choice it increases/decreases all the grains keeping them at the same contribution percentage. All the weights of all the grains increase/decrease.
What I believe that technique doesn’t take into consideration is that as the grain mass increases the efficiency of extracting sugars from the mash can drop.
Since the specialty malts can contribute far less in the way of sugars but contribute more to specific flavors (toffee, dried fruit, cracker, toasted bread, roasted coffee, etc, etc…), I can see the point of increasing them — just not increasing them as much as the base to keep them in check.
So, the original percentage contribution of sugars from the base can be less due to an efficiency drop, while the flavors derived from the ‘character malts’ increases by whatever weight adjustment was made. IOW, potential is there for adding more flavor percentage to possibly less sugar percentage and could cause an imbalance.
I believe this is the reason for the caution in BCS for an ‘over the top’ beer. I also believe this is the reason some brewers use malt extract or simple sugars post mash if all the grains were increased proportionally — to bring balance back into the beer by adding sugars to balance the increased flavor from character malts.
Of course, some people like their coffee strong. Others don’t. The OP has to figure out which direction his taste buds prefer.
Don’t you also get more flavor from the base malts, not just sugars?