Nob Heavy Ale

Last Saturday morning (the 8th for the brewing diary!) myself and co-brewer Nick settled into our regular brewing routine. Up early in the morning for some bottling and then by mid morning be ready to kick start our next brew.

We bottled up our second pilsner, this time we added an extra 500g of light malt to hopefully bump up the ABV by a very small amount - we are aiming for 4.5% ideally.

With that bottled our thoughts turned to our next brew. We have made one nutty ‘ale’ previously, however it came out more of a dark lager rather than anything overly creamy and full bodied. It does taste nice, however it is not the stouty / porter that we set out for.

With this in mind we thought we would target the top end of the scale, a nice rich heavy alcoholic stout.

Recipe:

1.8kg Brewcraft Irish Stout
1kg Morgans Chocolate Malt (liquid  in tin)
1kg Morgans Dark Crystal Malt (liquid in tin)
1kg ’stout combo’ which has a mix of light and dark malt with dried corn syrup.
0.5kg light dried malt.
0.5kg golden syrup.

25g hop bag of fuggles was steeped for 30mins and then chucked in the fermenter with some pre-started Safale S-04 yeast and 20 litres of Brisbane’s finest water, which is not that good in all honesty!

The original gravity was read off at 1.090 and various mathmatics points us towards a heavy ale at 7.5-8.8% , and if you believe one online calculator it will come out as 10.2% !

Total cost for this was $52.90 , and with expected 18 litres to play with after racking and gravity tests we expect to fill roughly 50 bottles (330 ml) , giving a cost per bottle of $1.06 excluding carbonation drops and other odd charges on top.