Our much-anticipated (for me, anyway) Founders Breakfast Stout clone is finally ready to drink and I'm really happy with the results. This was our first beer using a yeast starter, our first beer using temperature control all the way through fermentation, and a fun beer to brew since it involved chocolate and local coffee from Ceremony Coffee Roasters. The beer smelled amazing all the way through the brew process so I've been really looking forward to tasting it.
There's tons of coffee flavor. There's some chocolate too but not a ton. I could see adding more chocolate if we brew this again. It also could use a little bit more carbonation. We only used 100g of DME for carbonation in this brew compared to 119g for the black IPA and 152g for the saison.
The first bottle I tried seemed to lack a little bit of mouthfeel, but for the second bottle I tried swirling the yeast in the bottom and pouring it into the glass rather than into the drain and it seems to improve the body a little. I'm so used to leaving the last little bit of yeast in the bottle with home brews but maybe that's not always the best idea.
I've been getting a lot of flack for noticing (imagining?) off flavors in a bunch of our home brews, but with this beer I really don't find any. It's a strongly flavored beer so they'd be easy to hide, but hopefully it's a good sign for our current brew process with the yeast starter and temperature control.
The name of the beer is partly a reference to the fact that this was our first beer using a yeast starter. It's also because so many coffee beers are named around the idea of starting your day with a beer. After all, as the saying goes, you can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning!
[ Founders Breakfast Stout Brew Day ] <---
