How To Brew A Dry Stout

This beer resembles more of the original stout porter, which was basically a double porter or stronger porter… Over time this style of beer has evolved into a style of its own and is recently brewed with nothing but dry roasted malt as far as specialty grains…

My recipe is not just dry roasted barley, which will therefore brew me a less than pitch black stout, but it’s still pretty dark (above 30 SRM for sure)… so here you have it…

Dry Stout Recipe
6 lbs Munton’s Light DME
13 oz Roasted Barley
6 oz Chocolate (UK) Malt
5 oz Carastan Malt
3 oz Munich Malt
.75 oz 9.1% AA Centennial Hops (60 min)
.25 oz 14.7% AA Columbus Hops (30 min)
.5 oz 5.5% AA Willamette Hops (15 min)
WLP023 Burton Ale Yeast (1 L starter)

Steeping Grains
Take 1.5 gallons of water and bring it up to 160 °F. Pour your grains into two separate muslin bags and drop them into your water. The water should drop in temperature to right about 154 &degF. At this temperature, you will steep for 25 to 30 minutes.

After steeping, remove the pot from the heat and take two cups of water and rinse both muslin bags over the wort (one cup per bag.) Let the bags drain as much as you can and then place the pot back on the heat.

The Boil
As you heat up the wort from your steeped grains, top off your pot with 3 gallons of water. To avoid overfilling your pot, add your DME first and then top off so you have approximately 4 gallons of wort in the pot.

Once you achieve a slow rolling boil and have control of the temperature, begin adding your hops (Centennial hops)… Thirty minutes later add your Columbus hops… 15 minutes after adding your Columbus hops, add your last charge of hops (Willamette hops.)

Make sure you stir occasionally throughout the boil while keeping a slow rolling boil. Total boil time should be 60 minutes…

Pitching Your Yeast
After the boil, you’ll want to place the cover on your pot and submerge it into an ice bath. It should cool down in about 30 minutes making a good cold break. You will then take your wort and pour it into your fermentor.

Top off your fermentor to make 5 gallons and stir in the wort to mix it well. Take a gravity reading to make sure you are in the right ballpark (1.056.) It’s okay to be plus or minus .005 off.

Take your yeast starter and decant it (separate the liquid from the yeast slurry). Pour in the yeast slurry into your wort. Then place the lid over your fermentor and shake it up to mix it in…

Fermentation
Ferment your stout for @62 &degF for the first 7 days. Make sure you’ve achieved full attenuation and then cool down your fermentor to 58 &degF and leave conditioning for 14 days.

Priming & Bottling
Mix 3 oz of corn sugar into 3/4 to 1 cup of water and microwave for 2 minutes. Let it cool down and make sure the liquid turns into clear syrup. Drop in your syrup into your bottling bucket and transfer your beer from your fermentor over the syrup.

Fill up your bottles and leave them bottle conditioning for 3 weeks and enjoy…

I actually left mine condition for 4 weeks and will probably age a bunch for 2 or 3 months. When you brew beers such as porters and stouts with many complex flavors, it takes a while before the different flavors ‘bond’ with each other and complement each other.

I’ve noticed that when I drink beers like these without conditioning them long enough it seems like the flavors try to fight each other to stand out. If I condition them longer, then the flavors tend to blend in and complement each other.

That’s just me and I may be full of s*#t, or crazy, but I believe in aging certain styles of beer and this one is one of them…

Overall I am very pleased with the results and I hope you are too if you decide to brew this beer…

Other Resources
How To Improve Your Brewing
How To Make a Yeast Starter
How To Brew Beer