Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout Brew Day

Saturday I got to brew a beer with my brother for the first time! He had never brewed beer before, so last time he was down he checked out our books of clone recipes and landed on Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout by Anderson Valley Brewing Company. The recipe is in North American Clone Brews.

Craig was on a limited time schedule and ran into traffic on the way down from New York, so he missed the start of the brew day. The only thing he missed was putting the specialty grains in the 150 degree water to steep them for 45 minutes. He arrived in time to help pull out the grain bag, add the DME, and start bringing the wort up to a boil.

It was a pretty standard brew day. Just two hop additions (90 mins and 15 mins) and compared to the Xmas Beer and Pumqueen we made lately, it seemed really straightforward. We brewed a 2-gallon batch, and between the smaller amount of liquid and the colder water from the tap, the wort chiller worked nice and fast. The one very minor hiccup was that the 90 minute boil time resulted in more boil-off than our usual 60-minute boil. We had enough to reach the target batch size, but not enough extra to actually get a taste. Good thing we have the refractometer to get a gravity reading with only a few drops! We came it at 1.060 OG, with is actually a few points higher than we planned, but that's never a bad thing.

Since we're only doing a 2-gallon batch, we'll be putting it into two 1-gallon carboys for secondary fermentation. For one of the carboys, we're going to try a "bourbon barrel" flavor. We bought a medium toasted oak spiral (like a column with lots of surface area) and put it in Knob Creek bourbon to soak for the next week. When we rack to the secondaries, we'll put the bourbon oak spiral in one of them. I can't wait to compare the two side by side to compare the effect of bourbon-soaked oak.

If we give one week for the primary and two weeks for the secondary, then that only leaves 2.5 weeks in the bottle before we're all together again at Christmas. Hopefully the beer is carbonated by then, but it could easily be another week or two (or more!) before the beer is really coming into its prime. I'm still not sure if we should just go with that or if we should try to compress the primary and secondary schedules a little bit in order to have longer in the bottle by Christmas.

It was really fun doing a beer with my brother. It's too bad that the schedule for racking and bottling won't line up with him being in town again, but hopefully just over a month from now we're enjoying a delicious oatmeal stout together that we brewed ourselves!

---> [ Oatmeal Stout Racking to Secondary ]