Dark yet again! The Portur I did as my first beer ever was really good, but I thought of doing something more stronger so the idea was to brew an Imperial Stout before Christmas. I followed the recipe Imperiets Vinterporter that was supposed to produce 7,9% alcohol with a thick, chocolate body and even if I think I succeeded with the taste, the alcohol volume I obviously did not. You might also wonder why I choose a porter recipe for my stout test, the reason being there’s no real differences and I think people try to separate them the best they can because historically there should be a difference. The best explanation to the different names I’ve heard is that stout is just a stronger porter, that simple. So if you’re of a different opinion you’ll most likely scream throughout my experiments, just a headsup.
The recipe was scaled to 18 liters and I re-scaled it to 13 liters so it would fit my equipment and I wasn’t too sure if it was going to be correct or work, but as the taste was good the amount of each malt types points to being scaled correctly. However, as I didn’t manage to reach the alcohol target, my mash efficiency was not on point. I measured OG at 1.066 and as the target was 1.088, it’s evident I missed the target by a huge amount. Even if I messed up the efficiency, the beer fermented as intended and the measured alcohol was measured to 5,3% in the end. There’s always the other positive side of things when ABV is lower – we can drink more bottles before becoming too hammered.
The big problem with efficiency was that I didn’t know what percentage the recipe calculated with, nor did I know my own so I had to back track to my first batch and see what I had that time which was 60%. I also calculated the recipe to count on an efficiency of 80% which is pretty high for a high alcohol volume beer as it’s difficult to keep higher efficiency the higher SG you’re looking for as the ratio malts and water is smaller. There’s probably more reasons, but a rule of thumb when doing higher alcohol brews is to calculate with a lower efficiency than normal which is great to learn already in my second batch. 60% mash efficiency is not bad nor is it actually uncommon for beginners, the most important thing is to have a stable and known efficiency so you know when creating the recipe what you’ll have, otherwise all the numbers will be incorrect and result in a different beer than intended.
In the end, this stout was very well received from those who enjoy darker beer and I liked it quite a lot as well. I’ve already setup a goal – to redo this recipe but hitting the target ABV!
info
- Style - Imperial stout
- Hops - East Kent Goldings
- Yeast - wyeast 1318
- ABV - 5.3%
- IBU - 56