Burnt Cookie Stout

With a few beers under my belt (even though most were stolen), my mind wandered a bit and I wanted to venture out.  At a beer pairing dinner sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery, I had read about their recent brewing of an oatmeal cookie stout.  To me, this sounded amazing since I am a fan of stouts and an even bigger fan of oatmeal cookies.  Back in the day, the one dessert my mother made on a consistent basis were oatmeal cookies.  They were her favorite and my favorite as well.  The only bad part.  Most of them usually ended up burnt or a nice tinged black on the bottom.  So we just had to pick the top off.

Date of Initial Brew: 3/28/2010

Type of Beer: Imperial Stout

Name of Beer: Burnt Cookie Stout

Extract or All Grain: All Grain

Grains used: 8lb Pale Malt, 1 lb Chocolate malt, 1lb Black barley, 1lb Flaked Oats, 1 lb Honey Malt

Hop Schedule:

1.0    Kent Goldings (60 min)

Irish Most (10 min)

Yeast: Irish Ale

Original Gravity Temperature and Reading: 80° 1.0614

Secondary Fermentation Date: 4/4/10

Specific Gravity Temperature and Reading: 68° 1.0147

Bottling Date: 5/5/2010

Final Gravity Temperature and Reading: ?

ABV%:

First bottle drank date:

NOTES: Used 6 lbs of pureed (not a word, yet.) raisins.  Leave room at the top, raisins float! Only came out with 3.5 gallons of beer, next time only use 3lbs of raisin or a bigger barrel. Finally a bottle conditioned, others not so much.

Some are over-carbonated and some are under-carbonated. Crap. Getting better on 7/4/10.

After a week in the primary, the stout was looking kid. Since I was new to the brewing game, I did my research on adding fruits into beer.  I decided to go with about 6lbs of raisins and pureed  them in a blender.  If you’ve never tried to puree raisins before, it wasn’t fun.  The idiot that I am just dumped (after sanitizing) the raising in the blender expecting them to go.  Well they didn’t.  I had to add a lot of water to the raisins to get a fine puree.  Underestimated the amount of space 6lbs of raisins takes up in a carboy.  The beer and raisins were pretty close to the top before I tucked it away in the closet.

Two days later I went to check on the beer.  There was a puddle with some raisins coming from under the door. Shit.  I opened the door and the raisins had pushed themselves out of the carboy onto the floor. Double shit.  I cleaned up the mess, carefully scooped out a little bit of the raisins, and gave the beer another try. Sadly, this beers brewing was exactly like my mothers’ cooking, a disaster.  After bottling, I was concerned that the beer might have went bad. I was wrong. It didn’t go bad, it went carbonated.  Way carbonated from the raisins sugars.  Upon opening one in the first months after bottling, like a volcano, the head and beer came out.  If poured directly in a glass it was fine, just well carbonated.  Oh yea, the raisin chunks in the beer didn’t help the beer either.

We all have those beers we want so bad to taste good, unfortunately, this wasn’t one of them.  This beer has been retired, for now.