A dark, boozy stout, with complementary flavors of coffee, smoked rye, and sweet chocolate.
Brew Size: ~7 gallons
Weyermann Pilsner Malt 10 pounds
Flaked Oats 4.5 pounds
Weyermann Cara Munich II 1.2 pounds
Weyermann Rauchmalt 1.2 pounds
Viking Cookie Malt 1.2 pounds
Weyermann Chocolate Rye 1.1 pounds
Centennial 4 oz
Cascade 4 oz
Wyeast 1056 American Ale Yeast (I made a yeast starter)
About 18 oz of coffee, steeped overnight in French press (I used my favorite coffee, Humboldt Coffee Roaster’s Organic Breakfast Blend)
Splashes of homemade vanilla extract and cocoa extract (vanilla beans and cocoa steeped in vanilla vodka)
Mashed at ~154° for 80 minutes.
Fermented in primary about a month before bottling.
I wanted to make a version of Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Breakfast, which is a wonderful, dark, and syrupy stout—but I’m very cheap and Mikkeller costs a lot (and isn’t readily available in the far reaches of the Pacific Northwest). I’d also never made a stout, so I wanted to try my hand at brewing that didn’t require opening a million hop packets and create something a little more welcoming than another bitter IPA. This ended up being one of the best beers I’ve made—a pitch black, easily drinkable combination of sweet syrup and smoked notes with a pronounced coffee taste that was more biscuity than acidic.
Mikkeller published its Beer Geek recipe, but I’d heard mixed reviews and decided to cobble together a recipe based on how other people had made the beer (for example, here and here). I was a little nervous about adding coffee—there’s a lot of debate about how to best brew your coffee and when to add it to your beer—and I didn’t want it adding any kind of acidic, fruity notes to the beer. My solution was to create a regular French press worth of coffee, let it steep overnight, and then add the coffee into the fermenter three days before bottling.
I also wanted to bring out the coffee flavors by accentuating them with some chocolate. For about two weeks I steeped organic cocoa nibs in some Smirnoff vanilla vodka and created a cocoa extract, which I added a bit to at the beginning of fermentation and then a small amount more in the last days before bottling alongside the coffee. I’d also been making some vanilla extract using Madagascar vanilla beans soaked in vanilla vodka, and threw some of that in as well. I was conservative with how much I added, and I never ended up tasting any vanilla in the beer. But the coffee notes came through and I suspect the extracts helped create that distinct flavor.
Overall, this beer was easy to make—except for the amount of heavy lifting. Turns out 20 lbs. of wet oats and a cooler full of hot water is a little tricky to pour into a kettle. I also overestimated how much water I needed when sparging, and produced more wort than expected—but, in the end, it all tasted delicious. This may have been the one beer I’ve made that absolutely everyone has enjoyed. Given the beer’s strength, I’m not surprised!