After pulling the Imperial Stout out of the barrel, I’ve been looking for something else to put in. When a friend of ours brought back some Vanilla beans from Tahiti, I figured why not use the two?

Brewer’s Notes

This is a pretty basic clone recipe from the Szamatulski book Beer Captured. However, I was missing the Chinook hops, so subbed in some Warrior. The IBUs went up a little bit, and I hope to compensate for that with the barrel aging and the Vanilla. The brew day went smoothly, and we held the mash +/- 5 deg. F. We also ran out of Oxygen during the airation phase, but should have gotten enough in. The outcome was a mildly sweet wort with burnt, roasty flavors and strong bitterness at the back of the throat. Lingering chocolate on the finish. The mouthfeel / body was heavy.

OG: 1.066 @ 69F, target 1.073
FG: 1.022 @ 65F, target 1.020

Fermenting Notes

Primary

Target Temperature range: 70F
We were able to get the beer to fermenting temperature within 24h, and then switched to heating mode. It has been very cool, which allowed the fermenter to maintain a good temperature, however we were out of town during the primary fermentation – it looks like it was very vigorous, and the fermenter couldn’t control the temperature!

Average: 70.73F
Standard Deviation: 1.71

oatmeal_stout_primary

Secondary

Target Temperature: 70F

12/2/2013 – 1.024 Roasty aroma and flavor with malt sweetness. Thick mouthfeel, from the oatmeal?

Average: 70.05F
Standard Deviation:0.49

oatmeal_stout_secondary

12/14/2013 1.022 @ 65F – Racking to barrel. SRM is good, but the beer is very dry, with a light cereal taste. Bitter, and not really drinkable right now. Some roast flavor, possibly can break out the Willamette. Hoping we get some sweet left in the barrel to offset the bitterness. We will leave it in the barrel for a few months before adding Vanilla.

Tasting Notes

4/21/14 1.016 @ 61F – Racking to keg.  Extremely dry beer. Strong malt flavor with bitterness. No hop aroma.  Pulled a sample and added vanilla extract, did not help the flavor, so we’re not going to use our vanilla beans on this batch.  Moved it over to a keg and we’re going to forget about it for a while.

6/4/14 – Racking to bottles.  Allowed it to carbonate at 9psi for a week, giving it about 2.0 vols.  It is better than expected, but still has a lot of weight for the dryness.  Aging is serving the beer well.  A bit over bittered.  The light whiskey flavor adds sweetness that offsets the dryness of the beer.  Roasted barley and toffee notes.  Whiskey and malt in the aroma, with a thin chocolate head.

The bottles don’t seem to have enough carbonation – we noticed this the last time we bottled off of the keg.  I think we’ll need to over-carb in order to get the right level of carbonation using the current picnic-tap beer-gun method of filling.  In general, this is an OK batch, but it’s not good on a warm day.

Recipe