Beersmith comes with a sample set of recipes that includes one by Brad Smith for Dry Stout. (Stray thought: BeerXML needs a few additional fields, like an absolute identifier for a specific recipe -- something more specific than the NAME tag. I apologize for that digression.)
I am a new brewer (this is my 9th batch) and in making this beer, in retrospect, two things stood out. The first was the lack of roasted barley. The second was the total size of the grain bill, 8 lbs., which in comparing this with other recipes seemed very low. After talking with my local homebrew store I tweaked the grain bill to reduce the flaked barley and add in roasted barley. I made this as a half-batch (2.5 gallons), so my recipe ended up: 2.5 lbs 2-row, .5 lbs flaked barley, .5 lbs black barley, .5 lbs roasted barley (in other words, 4 lbs of grain), 1.25 oz East Kent Goldings, 1/4 tsp Irish Moss, and 1 package Danstar Windsor yeast (recommended by my homebrew store instead of the Irish Ale yeast specified in the recipe because this time of year my "beer closet" is very slightly warmer than desirable).
The OG was 1.38 (on the nose!) but fermentation seemed wussy... lots of airlock activity for a few hours, but not the really vigorous snowglobe fermentation I have seen with my other batches, and then things got very quiet. Very thin layer of krausen; evidence of a yeast cake on the bottom but not that thick sludge I've had for other batches. Four days later, I took a reading and it was 1.018--better than I feared, but still not great. Tastes nice, but not as dry as I was shooting for. Maybe things will lower in the next week... the recipe calls for 11 days fermentation.
Is that recipe correct? It is one of the lowest grain bills (by percent of total volume) I have seen for a beer recipe. Also, why no roasted barley in the original? Is it possible it was left out and the total grain bill should really be a pound or two higher?
I am a new brewer (this is my 9th batch) and in making this beer, in retrospect, two things stood out. The first was the lack of roasted barley. The second was the total size of the grain bill, 8 lbs., which in comparing this with other recipes seemed very low. After talking with my local homebrew store I tweaked the grain bill to reduce the flaked barley and add in roasted barley. I made this as a half-batch (2.5 gallons), so my recipe ended up: 2.5 lbs 2-row, .5 lbs flaked barley, .5 lbs black barley, .5 lbs roasted barley (in other words, 4 lbs of grain), 1.25 oz East Kent Goldings, 1/4 tsp Irish Moss, and 1 package Danstar Windsor yeast (recommended by my homebrew store instead of the Irish Ale yeast specified in the recipe because this time of year my "beer closet" is very slightly warmer than desirable).
The OG was 1.38 (on the nose!) but fermentation seemed wussy... lots of airlock activity for a few hours, but not the really vigorous snowglobe fermentation I have seen with my other batches, and then things got very quiet. Very thin layer of krausen; evidence of a yeast cake on the bottom but not that thick sludge I've had for other batches. Four days later, I took a reading and it was 1.018--better than I feared, but still not great. Tastes nice, but not as dry as I was shooting for. Maybe things will lower in the next week... the recipe calls for 11 days fermentation.
Is that recipe correct? It is one of the lowest grain bills (by percent of total volume) I have seen for a beer recipe. Also, why no roasted barley in the original? Is it possible it was left out and the total grain bill should really be a pound or two higher?
). "Due in large part to the AHA style definition, 12 of 13 dry and foreign stouts from the NHC second round include roast barley" (even though roast barley was only found in 60% of commercial samples). The homebrew store folks are not slaves to style -- they are very encouraging of playing around -- but I can still see where they might question a dry stout that doesn't have roast barley *qua* roast barley, versus black barley, just based on most recipes they've seen.