Foreign Export Stout Recipe

Well sometimes despite your best efforts a batch just doesn't come out like you planned. In this case I think I wrote (what I think is)a pretty good recipe, I hit my numbers on brew day, and it had a strong cool fermentation, but somewhere along the way some wild microbe found its way into the beer. After a few weeks in a 3 gallon secondary a thin skin began to develop on the surface of the beer, after noticing it I added a couple campden tablets to kill whatever the infection was, but I was too late.

The infection was surprising as I haven't brewed any sour beers lately and I had just replaced my tubing, bottling wand, and bottling bucket spigot. Hopefully I sanitized well after this beer as I have several more (hopefully) clean beers that were brewed after this one but before I realized it was infected.

The recipe was inspired by Pelican's Tsunami Stout. I think it is an interesting beer because it is a big stout without any crystal malt, just basemalt, dark/roasted grains, and some flaked barley for body and head retention. It is pretty bitter (50 IBUs) with some Willamette in the mid-boil for a bit or aroma. Definitely more in line with something like Deep Shaft Stout from Freeminer than the sweet "Tropical" stouts like the Guinness Foreign Export Stout brewed in the Caribbean.

With some age this beer may improve, some foreign export stouts are tinged with Brett. If it gets to an acceptable place I'll post a review. I'll eventually give this recipe another try, but if anyone else brews it in the meantime let me know.

Foreign Export Stout

Recipe Specifics (All-Grain)
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Batch Size (Gal): 3.50
Total Grain (Lbs): 10.00
Anticipated OG: 1.070
Anticipated SRM: 49.8
Anticipated IBU: 51.3
Brewhouse Efficiency: 68 %
Wort Boil Time: 105 Min

Grain
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8.25 lbs. Maris Otter
0.75 lbs. Flaked Barley
0.50 lbs. Roasted Barley
0.25 lbs. Chocolate Malt
0.25 lbs. Black Patent Malt

Hops
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0.84 oz. Galena @ 60 min.
0.50 oz. Willamette @ 20 min.
0.50 oz. Willamette @ 10 min.

Extras
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0.25 Tsp Yeast Nutrient @ 15 Min.(boil)
0.50 Whirlfloc @ 15 Min.(boil)

Yeast
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WYeast 1028 London Ale

Mash Schedule
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Sacch Rest 60 min @ 154

Notes
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Brewed 10/13/08 by myself

3.75 gallons of mash water treated with 3 grams of chalk, and 3 grams of baking soda. pH was too high, so I added 2 g of CaCl and 2 g of phosphoric acid to get it down to 5.5 at room temp.

Acidified sparge water with 2 g of acid.

Collected 5.5 gallons of 1.048 runnings.

Hit gravity and volume pretty well. Chilled down to 74 and put into the chest freezer at 55 degrees.

Waited 4 hours for it to cool more, then aerated with 60 seconds of pure O2 and pitched yeast slurry from the Pale Brown Porter. Set the freezer to 61.

10/17/08 Turned temp up to 65 to help it finish.

10/26/08 Sample, 1.017 (7% ABV, 76% AA)

11/02/08 Transferred to 3 gallon secondary.

11/15/08 Seemed to be developing a thin skin on the surface. Might be nothing, but to be safe I added 3 campden tablets dissolved in water.

11/16/08 Bottled with 2.5 oz of cane sugar and some S-04.

11/30/08 Seems to be infected. A friend described it as 2 beers in one, a good chocolaty beer and a funky beer. Hopefully with some age it will improve. It reminds me more than a little of a lower gravity version of my Courage clone.

12/01/08 A bottle exploded, so I dumped the rest of the batch. A very sad Monday morning.

12/24/10 Jeff and Tom from the Lug Wrench Brewing Company Blog brewed this recipe and sent me a few bottles.  I thought it turned out very well, lots of bitter roast, worth the wait.

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