BIAB Oatmeal Stout- first go

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Hengoedbrewer

Hengoedbrewer

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Hi all

After some back and forth and researching a few different recipes; I have ordered the ingredients for an oatmeal stout to brew either this weekend or next. It will be my second BIAB attempt. Recipe and method is here:

https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/844423/biab-stout

Pretty standard copying of Clibit's simple all grain method except for cold steeping dark grains. If anyone spots anything obviously wrong or has any pointers, would greatly appreciate it!
 
Make sure you've plenty of water to soak your specialist grains in, and watch your absorption/sparge calculations. I've just brewed a similar stout with a cold steep and I don't think I used enough water (2:1 is what I thought would be enough, it wasn't and it turned to a sludge that I couldn't pass through a sieve) and ended up under gravity and over volume.
 
HarryFlatters said:
Make sure you've plenty of water to soak your specialist grains in, and watch your absorption/sparge calculations. I've just brewed a similar stout with a cold steep and I don't think I used enough water (2:1 is what I thought would be enough, it wasn't and it turned to a sludge that I couldn't pass through a sieve) and ended up under gravity and over volume.
Click to expand...
Thank you for that. As it is only my second attempt I am still getting to grips with all grain and the whole efficiency thing, I didn't to be honest pay too much attention to it last time, planning to be a bit more thorough this time. I'm looking at 2L of water for the cold steep, for 330g of dark grains- does this sound okay to you? I also ended up over volume in fermenter last time, but only bottled 15x 500l, so 7.5 litres or so.
 
I think I forgot to subtract the cold steeped grains (and how much I ended up having to sparge them) from my total sparge volume, and I added the cold steeped grain's weight to the total grain bill for calculating absorption, so ended up 5 litres over volume, and many gravity points down.

I still made beer though, so I'm fairly happy :beer1:
 
Ahhh. I think I have worked out that I have 13L of water in total including all mash / sparge / cold steeping liquor, so with grain absorption / boil off taken into account, I hopefully shouldn't be too far off what I want in the fermenter in the end....
 
Just playing devil's advocate, why are you cold steeping your dark grains? The might be an argument for doing it in something like a black IPA where you just want the colour but surely the flavour you get is part of what makes it a stout?

Are you sure you're not just making life harder for yourself if you're still finding your feet?

(I'm on a make-things-simpler kick at the moment - if it's something you particularly want to try then go for it! athumb..)
 
Last edited:
HarryFlatters said:
From the reading that I did @matt76, the cold steep (even in a stout) rounds out the flavours so you don't need anything like the conditioning time as you don't have the harsh and astringent flavours in there in the first place.

https://homebrewacademy.com/cold-steep-dark-grains-experiment/

http://brulosophy.com/2017/12/04/roasted-grains-pt-4-cold-steeping-vs-full-mash-exbeeriment-results/
Click to expand...
@matt76 doing it for these reasons, pretty much this spot on ^ Cold steeping of roasted grains apparently makes a dark beer smoother taste wise, rather than being harsh and roasty. I've cold steeped grains in a partial mash before and it turned out quite well.
 

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