Queen's Park Stout Mark III + chili variations

Recipe

Batch size: 5 gallons total; 3 as stout, 1 with chipotle, 1 with habanero

Grain bill:

• 7 lb pale malt
• 1 lb roasted barley
• 1 lb barley flakes
• 1 lb unmalted oatmeal
• 0.5 lb pale chocolate malt
• 0.25 lb Crystal 120

Hops:

• 1 oz Zeus (13.6%) @ 60

Yeast: Notty

Brew Day

Feb 6, 2011: Did my usual overnight mash. Heated water inside, as it was cold and nasty out. Split boil: 5 gal to 62C, 2 gal to 85C. When mixed in the mash tun, it came out at 160F/72C; a few minutes later, it was 148F/58C. A bit lower than I wanted, but oh well. Fell to 54C overnight.

Yield was 6-6.5 gallons; not doing this in my usual keggle, so measuring is less precise. OG was 1.052, which was right where I wanted. Split boil, like the mash.

Here's how I split it up:

• 3 gallons: just stout.
• 1 gallon: 40g cocoa and 1 dried habenero pepper
• 1 gallon: 40g cocoa and 1 dried chipotle pepper

This was based very roughly on a porter brought to a homebrew club meeting that was really, really good.

Gravity: 1.055. Nice!

Bottling

Split up over three days: March 1 - 3rd. Chili beers were very, very spicy; since they were left there too long (3 week!) I'm not too surprised. Not sure how drinkable they'll be, but I might be able to blend them or use them for chili. Gravityy was 1.009, so 5.9%. Got about six bottles each of the two chili beers and one bottle that mixed the two; much more of the stout.

Tasting

March 10, 2011: Tried a bottle of the stout tonight; early, but I couldn't wait. There's a strong bitter cocoa sort of flavour which I can only assume came from the pale chocolate, as there was no cocoa in the stout. It's too strong, I think, and I'll have to see how this one goes...not sure how successful this will be.