Bitches Brew
02 December 2018
Badass brewin’!
A group of women from the homebrew club decided to get together and do a collaborative brew. 7 of us, plus assorted husbands got together on three of our systems: propane burner, Grainfather, and Braumeister.
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In total we made 15 gallons of Milk Stout, and six of us took 2.5 gallon home.
Each of us did something different to jazz up our mini-batch. Variations included:
- Cinnamon Swirl (cinnamon sticks soaked in vodka for a while)
- Chocolate milk stout (Cacao nibs added in secondary)
- Several kinds of yeast
- Pumpkin Spice Latte (described below)
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My variation was as ‘basic white girl’ as I could get: Pumpkin Spice Latte porter. Once fermentation had finished I added 6 oz of cold brew coffee (made with StarSan’ed equipment and previously boiled water), and 2 tablespoons of pumpkin pie spices that had been soaking in rum. Like my Chai Milk Stout, I made a tincture of spices in run and let it sit for about 2 weeks. The timing is more or less the time it takes to ferment! I mix the spices.
I decided to bottle this beer. The flavoring is rather strong, so I am not going through it quickly. Rather than tie up a keg for a long time (and possibly have the spices and coffee taste get into the lines), I did an assortment of bottles, so I can continue to enjoy for a long time to come.
This format was a really great way to share knowledge and have a fun social day supporting each other as brewers!
Tasting Notes
Overall impression- Very smooth base to work from. Oddly, even with the added coffee, I feel that my version was more of a porter based, less coffee-bitter than I would expect for a full stout.
I plan to enter this in competition, so the stout/porter designation does matter. The spicing is a little heavy. Mostly I’ve been enjoying this in floats with vanilla ice cream.