Double-Header Brew Day!

Believe it or not, it is already time to start the Christmas beer! This years brew – Imperium Brettania – is an inky-black 100% Brettanomyces lambicus fermented Russian Imperial Stout, aged on French oak. Yep, those of you on my xmas exchange list have something to look forward to!

As with my other all-brett dark beers I’ve made efforts to reduce the amount of grain-derived phenols, in order to limit the production of unpleasant levels of 4-ethylpheol (burnt plastic) and other potentially unpleasant phenols by replacing half of the dark malts with their de-husked equivalents (i.e. carafa special II and III in place of some of the black and chocolate malts). This is combined with a lower-end hop schedule (BU:GU of 0.66), which I hope will keep things balanced once the Brett drys out the beer. This is topped off with a cherry-flavour producing yeast (B. lambicus, Wyeast 5526). This is about as big a beer as I can brew – the 11kg of malt plus 28L of water fills my mash-tun to the lid!

The downside of brewing all-grain big beers like this is that your efficiency usually sucks – its not unheard of for 30% of the fermentables to remain trapped in the mash-tun. I’m fixing this by partigyling this batch – once I’ve collected the first runnings (Imperium Brettania), I’m doing a second sparge to gather the residual sugars, after which I’m going to hop the runnings with some Willamette hops left over from an older batch, and if needed I’ll add a bit of sugar to up the gravity and dry the beer out. I’m not certain what this is going to yield – a sessionable stout, or perhaps a summer mild? Either way, its being named 50,002. Why you ask? That’s how many views this blog has recieved as of this morning!

Recipe and notes below the fold.