I spent several days scouring the internet looking for either winning homebrew recipes, or recipes for well regarded commercial Imperial Stouts. I eventually came across this thread on Homebrew Talk with a recipe for Kate the Great (KtG), directly from the brewer at Portsmouth.
KtG is one of those legendary beers that is so limited that I may never get a chance to try it, so I instantly knew that was what I was going to brew.
The recipe from the head brewer at Portsmouth is as follows:
When we brew a batch of Kate we use 77% Pale malt, 2% Crystal 45, 1% Caramel 120, 1% Chocolate malt,1% Black malt, 3% Carafa DH# 3 (Weyerman),3.5% Wheat malt 3.5% Flaked Barley, 2% Roasted malt,3.5% Special B, 2.5% Aromatic. We dough in at 166 to stabilize the mash at 149 degrees F. Saccrification rest for 45 min. or until conversion occurs. Vorlauff (recirculate) 'til clarified and run off. Collect about 1/3rd of your wort and sparge to collect 6.5 gals (for a 5 gal. yield) at 26 degrees Plato or 1.104 degrees Specific Gravity. Yea it's big.... but we like it like that!! (So you are going to need to use your mash tun efficiency to figure out how many pounds of malt you are going to need in total. But to tell you the truth when you get to this thick of a mash your efficiency is going to drop 3-4%).
Boil the wort for 5 mins. for the hot break and then add your bittering hops for 75 mins. We bitter at 38 IBUs with Magnum, 10 IBUs with Styrian Golding and 15 IBUs with Perle. This is the bittering addition. We add a flavor addition for 15 mins with Centennial for 2 IBUS. Our final addition of Palisade, Styrian Golding and Willamette account for about 3 more IBUs at whirlpool. Cool wort and pitch a good amount of White labs WLP 001 or Wyeast 1056 and ferment til it is done. Put into conditioning for about 5 or 6 months and you'll have an amazing imperial stout.
A little more digging and I came across this thread on The Brewing Network in regards to the oaking process Portsmouth uses.
Their process is:
As far as the Kate's oaking goes. All of Kate is lightly oaked. We make our own Portwood simply by infusing oak spirals ( The Barrel Mill, Avon, MN- 800.201.7125) with local Port. Of course if I told you the amounts and proportions I have to kill you!! Actually, we take 6 spirals and break them up, place them into a 10 gal. corny keg and pour 3 bottles of Tawney Port over the spirals. We add about 10 PSI to the keg and let the concoction sit for 18-25 days. Then we fill the remainder of the 10 gal. keg with Kate. Let it sit at ambient temp for 45-60 days then inject the 10 gals back into the 440 gals of KtG. Once the keg is empty we then back fill the 10 gals and let the Kate sit on the oak for another 6 months. This become the double oaked Kate. Very rare, only about 56 bottles produced. Hope this helps. Kate can age for 6 years once in bottles, if truth be known!! Cheers! Tod Mott
My Recipe
With 11 different malts, this is by far the most complicated recipe I have ever come across, but with KtG being so highly regarded they must be on to something. I always thought that I had simplified the grain bill a little bit, but looking at my recipe just now I realized that I have 11 malts also. I tweaked the original grain bill slightly based on my intuition, and closing my eyes and pointing to random bags of malted barley.
My mash tun maxes out at a little over 20 lbs of grain, so in this case I knew I would have to add some extra fermentables to hit the required starting gravity. These included a pound each of pale DME, and Muscavodo sugar.
The hops were simplified slightly to just Warrior for bittering, and Palisade plus Willamette for the late addition.
No. 23: Kate the Great Inspired Imperial Stout
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ready to be bottled |
Boil Size: 7.00 gal
Estimated OG: 1.105 SG
Estimated Color: 55.4 SRM
Estimated IBU: 63.4 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 65.00 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes
Grain
10.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
6.50 lb Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM)
1.00 lb Midnight Wheat (550.0 SRM)
0.75 lb Barley, Flaked (1.7 SRM)
0.75 lb Special B Malt (180.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Aromatic Malt (26.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Brown Malt (65.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Crystal Malt - 45L (45.0 SRM)
0.25 lb Black (Patent) Malt (500.0 SRM)
0.25 lb Crystal Malt -120L (120.0 SRM)
0.25 lb Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM)
1.00 lb Light Dry Extract (8.0 SRM)
1.00 lb Muscovado Sugar (25.0 SRM)
Hops
1.50 oz Warrior [17.00 %] (60 min)
0.50 oz Palisade [6.70 %] (10 min)
0.50 oz Williamette [5.50 %] (10 min)
0.50 oz Palisade [6.70 %] (0 min)
0.50 oz Williamette [5.50 %] (0 min)
Yeast
Safale US-05
Mash Schedule
Mashed @ 149F for 75 Minutes
Fermentation Temp
62F ambient
Actual Numbers
Measured OG: 1.104
Measured FG: 1.030
ABV: 9.7% (9.8% after Port addition)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Port & French Oak Addition
 |
| French Oak Soaking in Port |
Thinking back to my Bourbon Vanilla Porter recipe, where I used 350ml of Bourbon, I decided to start with 250ml of port. 1oz of french oak chips were soaked in the port for 2 weeks while the beer was fermenting. I added the mixture after the beer had spent about 6 weeks in the fermenter.
Pretty much immediately after adding the port and oak mixture I realized that Portsmouth did state their total batch size for KtG. Based on that batch size, they add 25ml of Port per 5 gallons of beer. So I ended up with about ten times more Port than the real thing.
Tasting
At this initial tasting the beer has been bottled for 7 weeks, after spending 2 months in the primary fermenter.
Port is definitely the most prominent aspect of this beer. The aroma all port, maybe with a hint of malt sweetness. The port is at the forefront of the flavour, but it doesn't completely overpower everything. Immediately following the taste of port is a subtle roastiness, finishing with a slight lingering bitterness and some acidity from the port. It has a slight bit of heat from the alcohol, and the French oak is nowhere to be found.
Overall it turned out quite well. The excessive amount of port hurt the final product a little bit, but its still quite pleasant to drink. It will be interesting to see what a couple more months in the bottle will do to the flavour.
Lynn's Take
"Chocolate? Is this a chocolate stout?"
What do you think?
"No thoughts really, my mind just kind of went blank."
Thoughts for Next Time
I wouldn't hesitate to brew this beer again, in fact I'm sure i will at some point. I would leave the recipe exactly the same with the exception of reducing the port and trying to get a little more of the oak flavour.
The oak chips were pretty much junk, with almost half the bag being slivers or pure dust. Next time I'll try to track down some cubes or a spiral. I would probably use just enough port to cover the oak, and possibly discard some of it depending on the amount, when it came time to add it to the beer.
No comments:
Post a Comment