Experimenting with coffee

Doesn't time fly! Recently brewing has taken a bit of a back seat to other goings on. The recent Lions rugby tour has taken up a good part of my weekends lately and taken it away from brewing time. All the matches are on Sky, which means I have to watch them down the pub! At 11am! so that's knocked out a lot of my usefulness at weekends. What a tour though, and what a result! My time has been well spent!

I have managed to fit in a couple of brews though, and one of them was a coffee oatmeal stout, or breakfast stout if you prefer (I think I do). Pulling inspiration, and most of the recipe, from the pages of the mad fermentationist (again), I brewed up an oatmeal stout that I then dosed with coffee. I decided to follow the idea of adding ground coffee, rather than brewed coffee this time. As the flavour of the coffee was going to be key here I took a pre-pub trip to Two-Day Roast, an independent coffee roaster in Bristol. Luckily the shop was quite quiet at that time, so I explained what I was doing and we talked through what coffee might go well. The lady there (whose name I forgot to get) wasn't entirely convinced by the idea of a coffee beer - "Why don't you just make beer that tastes like beer". But she really knows her coffee and gave me some great help. I came away with a lighter, sweeter Kenyan bean as well as a darker, more robust Indonesian bean - deciding to split the batch in half an try one coffee in each.

Coffee beans from Two Day Roast.

Having bought beans, I then had to buy a grinder too!

So here's what I made:

Ingredients

Amt Name Type # %/IBU 3.92 kg Maris Otter Low Colour Pale Malt (2.5 EBC) Grain 1 60.1 % 1.18 kg Oats, Flaked (Toasted) (2.0 EBC) Grain 2 18.0 % 0.52 kg Black Barley (Stout) (985.0 EBC) Grain 3 8.0 % 0.30 kg Chocolate Malt (886.5 EBC) Grain 4 4.6 % 0.26 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (78.8 EBC) Grain 5 4.0 % 0.19 kg Crystal 145 EBC (5.9 EBC) Grain 6 3.0 % 0.15 kg Chocolate Malt (Pale) (525.0 EBC) Grain 7 2.3 % 50.00 g Tettnang [5.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 8 30.6 IBUs 24.00 g EKG 2011 [5.40 %] - Boil 5.0 min Hop 9 2.6 IBUs 6.00 g Goldings, East Kent [6.40 %] - Boil 5.0 min Hop 10 0.9 IBUs 1.0 pkg Irish Ale Yeast (White Labs #WLP004) Yeast 11 - 45.00 g Coffee beans (Secondary 24.0 hours) Flavor 12 -

26/05/2013
All dark grains steeped in cold water overnight. Ratio of 454g to 1.9L => 1900/454= 4.185ml/g
970g * 4.185 = 4,059ml. Will be added to boil with 15mins to go, to sterilise it.
Water Treatment
Mash: 7ml Lactic acid, 1g Epsom salts, 1g Gypsum
Sparge: 1g Epsom salts, 1g Gypsum.
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27/05/2013
O.G. 1.058
Brew day went smoothly, the only issue was with the second runnings, post boil, which were quite cloudy. I expect this was due to the oats in the mash. Could be some issue with turbidity as a result, but I doubt that's very important in a stout.
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09/06/2013 (day 13)
S.G. 1.013

Fermentation has pretty stopped now, I think this is the F.G. From experience with this yeast, I don't think the S.G. will drop any further.
Split the batch in two and added 26g of very coarse ground coffee to each. The coffee was put into nylon bags so that it can be easily removed. Planning to remove the coffee after 24 hours, but I'll taste it at that point too.

One batch received a sweeter, lighter coffee from Kenya, the other had a darker, stronger coffee from Indonesia.
The stout itself didn't taste that sweet on it's own, so I'm expecting the Kenyan coffee to produce a better finished product. But the initial bitterness of the stout could well mellow over time to suit the Indonesian bean better.
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I did taste it after 24 hours and I reckon that was about the right amount of time. There was a good coffee flavour without overpowering the malts. The thing that is slightly strange though, is that the coffee tastes quite 'green'. As it hasn't been brewed, the flavour of the coffee is a lot drier and has more punch. It takes you by surprise when you first drink it as you expect the regular coffee flavour, and this is quite different. Once you get used to it and stop expecting a cup of coffee it's pretty good.

I'm not sure which I prefer best yet, more testing is required. But I will also let this age a bit longer to allow the flavours to mellow and combine a bit more. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this and it's good to try something out of the ordinary. This is the first time I've flavoured my beers with anything really, so it'll be interesting to see how it develops.