Had another brewday yesterday, and this time I am attempting to brew a roasty, hoppy, bitter American-style Imperial Stout. The brewday went quite well, and managed to get better efficiency than last time, by crushing finer and sparging with warmer water. I’m still not pleased with the efficiency (but this was a big beer though, so that might explain it being a little low), so will have to crush even finer next time. I ended up with a Original Gravity of ~1.092 (23 Plato) by adding 0.5kg of Light Dry Malt Extract, so if this ferments to around 1.020, the beer should end up with an ABV close to 9.5%. I might oak-age half the batch, since I have a lot of French oak chips left from my Vanilla-Brandy Porter. You can find the recipe below, along with some pictures (sorry about the poor quality, didn’t have my DSLR on hand).

[codebox 1]

The crushed grain. Could be a lot finer.

The mash. This was a pretty thick mash, because of the large amount of grain.

The boil. Damn, had my first boil over (my own fault, since I left the lid on the pot while heating the wort up to a boil, and stupidly left the thing unattended), but only lost a negligible amount of wort.

Lots of Chinook! This should be a very bitter, resiny and earthy beer!

In the primary. Since my fermenting refrigerator is still broken, I’m currently fermenting the beers in the garage, where the ambient temperature is around 14-16 degrees C.