Making it smooth

I recently brewed a batch of dry stout after not having brewed any kind of stout since 1993. The beer is balanced, but it does not have that Guiness silky smooth roast character. Guiness is to stout what Gevalia is coffee.  There’s no bitter edge to the roast.  Does anyone know how Guiness accomplishes this feat?  Is it just their water composition?  Or do they have a proprietary roasted barley?  I need to check my notes, but I believe that I used around 10% Thomas Fawcett roasted barley in the grist, which is right at the threshold were roasted barley starts to add that smoky, burnt note to a beer.

Water plays a huge role in how the roast character comes across in dark beers, pH in particular. If you haven’t read Martin’s article on Ireland’s brewing water in Zymurgy Nov/Dec 2013, I’d highly recommend it.

Guinness is partially soured so Guinness goes away from the conventional wisdom of higher pH being better in stouts. I subscribe to the conventional wisdom here even though I like sours.  Flaked barley and low carbonation  contribute significantly to the silky smooth character of Guinness.

Hear ya, Mark. I don’t like that smokey roast flavor and I seem to get it even at less than 10% in the grist. Like Eric mentioned, I think a pH around 5.5 is ideal. But Guinness goes for a lower pH I think to get a little bit of that lactic twang… I certainly wouldn’t say Guinness is the best dry stout example. Murphy’s is a mighty fine example and Beamish (when we could get it).

+1.  Flaked barley gives a ton of silky mouthfeel to Irish stout.  I like ~ 10%.

Did you mash the roasted grains?  Adding them at vorlauf seems to do the trick for me.

Is Guinness REALLY partially soured?  Anybody got documentation of this?

+1 - I trust Martin’s article and assessment of the brewing water in Dublin. His recommendation is to target a relatively low kettle pH (5.0-5.2) through a combination of soft water and dark, roasted grains (added separately from the main mash if that will bring your mash pH below the optimal range). So, while the pH of the beer will certainly end up lower than a typical stout/porter, and should have a bit of a tart finish, that doesn’t necessarily equate to a sour mash being needed.

when i took the tour, they did confirm two things- they use a “content of lactic acid” in the mash that is mashed separate from the roasted malts, then all wort is blended back together.

Which makes sense because it would just be the pale malts and the pH would be high. Interesting though on the separate mashes.

nobody specified but im presuming cold steep of the roasted grains…just conjecture

If I remember the article, I thought Martin said that, to duplicate the tang, you ‘mash’ the dark grains separately in RO with no water adjustments, which given the acidity of dark grains, gives that mash a pretty low pH. Then blend into the pH controlled base wort. Could be wrong.

Correct. Plus you will need to acidify the pale malt mash to get it in the proper pH range. But I would hardly call this “souring” the way we would typically think of it (like for a Berliner Weisse or something of that nature).

I had always heard as well that it was soured with soured guiness as well… obviously with nothing to back it up.

I read that for years, too. Kind of takes liberties with the idea of souring a beer by today’s standards, like Eric mentioned.

Thanks, Ken

AFAIK, that’s an urban myth.  Although possibly it was done in the past.

yeah that’s the one about their “old oak mash tuns” used back in the day that are said to be still used today and contained brett…not likely or practical considering the amount of guinness pumped out these days.

It’s still being done… By home brewers in my area unfortunately!

I had a local homebrewed Dry Stout that was lactic and Band-Aids. UGH! Upon asking, she said it was because her temperature control broke. Since that can’t be the cause of lactic/phenols I probed further and then quickly wished I hadn’t. Turns out she leaves out two pints of Guinness “until is sours, because that’s how Guinness does it” and then dumps that in at flame out.  o_O

Guinness creates their Guinness Flavor Extract (GFE) that is apparently just roast barley steeped in their very low alkalinity water. That should produce a liquor that has a pH nearing 4.5. That’s low for a typical wort, but not ‘sour’. I do not know if they actually sour the GFE. They combine that GFE with the regular wort composed of raw and malted pale barleys. That combination of substantial roast content, low pH, and regular wort help produce that sharp, roast flavor. That flavor and its moderation by the huge body imparted by the raw barley beta-glucans and raw barley flavor are what create that smooth Guinness flavor, IMHO.

I feel that you can get reasonably close to the Guinness dry stout result by adding the roast barley as a late mashing addition. However, as many pro-brewers and multi-Ninkasi winner Gordon Strong can attest, having the ability to Blend the beer components, gives you much more opportunity to fine tune the final product to taste and uniformity. I think that is why Guinness uses the GFE. Another reason is that their other breweries around the world may not have had access to low alkalinity brewing water and they could easily export the GFE to the other breweries for blending on site.

Guinness dry stout brewing is an interesting study, but I have to admit that I prefer other stouts and porters with smoother roast character.