Oatmeal Stout!

We're almost brewing too fast to keep up with the blogging! Last week we racked the IPA into secondary fermentation (more about racking in another post), got our kegs ready for the Octoberfest, made some beer grains bread, and brewed our first stout. Overall, I'd say that sounds like a pretty good week!

After going to Rogue Brewery's Valentine's Day beer and chocolate tasting a few years ago (TEN courses of chocolate and beer!!), I became inspired by how well stouts go with dessert. A creamy stout pairs just as well with cookies as a glass of milk. And for those who haven't tried it, a scoop of vanilla ice cream in your stout is a divine dessert! So this year I hope that we can keep ourselves from drinking up the stout we made on Wednesday before my holiday baking spree begins. I'm sure Santa will appreciate a stout with his cookies in place of yet another glass of milk.

The stout contained 11.5 lbs of delicious grains, including oatmeal and a tad bit of chocolate malt for that yummy chocolaty goodness. We decided to make a low IBU stout, opting for creamy, smooth drinkability over heavy bitterness and excessive ABV%. We added a couple ounces of hops to balance out the malts, but not enough to overwhelm the flavor. Lactose was added to the boil for an extra bit of creamy sweetness (milk sugar is unfermentable). Like the IPA we did an infusion mash, this time at 153 degrees F for 60 minutes. From the photos you can see the delicious, dark, stouty color!

The OG was 1.055, with IBUs around 35. The expected alcohol percentage should be 5.5-6%.

Check out the album for some shots of the process.

I also made bread again with the spent-grains. This time it came out even better than the last one, and makes excellent toast! Today we are brewing yet another beer, so there will be more posts to come soon!

Love your beer, it comes out better! (Me infusing the stout with love during the mash).

Yeast + Water + Grains = ??

No, its not just beer! These things also combine to make bread. And when you use your spent grains from brewing they combine to make delicious, awesome, magical bread!

I am by no means an expert baker (or really any kind of baker), but the guilt of throwing away pounds upon pounds of grains after each brew finally convinced me to undertake the project of learning a new fermentation science. I did a little reading about bread making, made a mash-up of a few spent grain bread recipes from around the internet and gave it my best effort. It turns out that making bread is fairly similar to making beer. You add together yeast, water, grains and patience and you get a tasty product that you can be proud of.

I decided to make a denser wheat bread this time using the grains from our recent Octoberfest beer. I threw together all-purpose flour, wheat flour, a couple cups of spent grains ground up in the food processor, yeast, an egg, some milk, sugar and a little salt. Lacking an electric mixer, I made a half recipe this time so I wouldn't be kneading all day. I kneaded the bread by hand for about 10 minutes until it was smooth and pliant and let it rise for 90 minutes. Here the dough is, all nestled into it's bowl waiting to rise- isn't it beautiful??

After it doubled in size I pounded it down, molded it into a loaf on a greased cookie sheet (note to self: need pizza stone) and let it double again before scoring the top and tossing it into the oven for 40 min at 350° F. When it came out, it looked like this:

As my first endeavor into bread making, I am quite proud of my little loaf. It isn't the most beautiful loaf of bread, but it represents the beginning of something beautiful (and man was it tasty!!). With each batch of beer, we can now have as much delicious home baked bread as we can eat! When I have experimented with making a few more loaves and perfect a recipe that is my own, I will be sure to post it here. Stay tuned!