The Stout: Revisited.

Last January, my Cinnamon Oatmeal Stout came in 2^nd in the specialty category at the Winter Warmers Homebrew competition held by the Club. Truth be told it was about 2 points down from being in first. A hit among the family and club, I was very happy with this beer.  However, despite all of the great reviews; I have to make changes to the beer. L

The homebrew club is doing an event called “Made on American Street” to jive with an event of such a name; the companion beer competition is all of the American beer styles. And since the stout is the beer I am the most proud of, American Stout it is.  

The original plan was for this beer to just be a plain old stout. However, disaster brew day made me change plans…

The Brew day started out great. Mashed in, no problem and temperatures  stayed consistent. And then came the mashout. As we were testing our new sparge arm, we saw a white floating piece of CPVC pipe. Soon we saw a larger piece of the CPVC, floating up. Turns out the CPVC manifold had completely come apart. This meant a “stuck sparge” and an afternoon of plans immediately shot.

With strainers in hand, my dad and fought the good fight to mash out with pounds of grains coming through the spout.  After about 15 minutes of this crazy exercise, we finally had enough wort for a boil.  Only problem was it was 30 points lower than it needed to be for this beer.

Extract is something that is used by brewers and breweries often because it provides a consistent flavor profile and beers made with it are not time consuming.  In this case, extract was added to the beer to provide the extra og points needed to get this beer where it needed to be. Some all-grain brewers look at using extract as the “easy way out” in this case, it was the only way to go.

Boil went normally as did cooling.. We haven't bottled this beer yet.. Hopefully, it'll be okay.