Sunday, February 9, 2014

Black Walnut Stout

Acknowledgements to RyanBrews for introducing me to the concept of "fat washing". If you have never heard of fat washing, go read Ryan's blog, but fat washing is basically just a way to incorporate flavors from fatty food into your beer without adding the unwanted oils. And while I have yet to be stupid brave enough to make a Buffalo Wing and Blue Cheese beer like Ryan did (!), I have now used fat washing to successfully brew beers with black walnuts. (I also did a coconut and thai basil beer, but this post is about black walnuts).

As Ryan describes, you need to be more patient with some ingredients relative to others. Make sure to wait several weeks for extracting something like black walnuts and you will be rewarded with a better product. I like to add flavorings at kegging or bottling so I'll describe this a bit more later in the post.

The base stout recipe is something I have been working on for ~3 years now. My original goal was to create a lower alcohol Founder's Breakfast Stout which still maintains the body and mouthfeel. The main tricks I use to achieve this are lots of flaked grains in the grain bill (~15%) and an English ale yeast (WLP023) in the fermenter. None of the American ale yeasts I have tried give the body or mouthfeel I desire for this brew. At this point the recipe has evolved stylistically into more of a Foreign Export Oatmeal Stout of sorts, but I would confidently put it up against FBS on the breakfast table any day of the week.

For this years batch I wanted to experiment with using Black Walnut throughout the process. So to begin, I added 1/4 lb. of toasted and milled Black Walnut flour to the mash. Yes this could potentially hurt head retention, but I was planning to keg and I did not notice excess oils in the glass or loss of head retention. Note: you cannot see the Black Walnut flour in the picture below.


NutMeat Stout (10 gls)  
17 lbs Maris Otter
1.75 lbs Flaked Oats
1.75 lbs Flaked Barley
1 lb UK Pale Chocolate
1 lb German Roasted Barley
0.6 lb German CaraMunich I
0.5 lb Special B
0.5 lb UK Brown Malt
0.25 lb Black Walnut flour
1.5 oz German Northern Brewer FWH
0.5 oz EKG 25''
Mash @ 152F
Expected ABV: ~6.5%
I added 3g of chalk to the mash and 3g of gypsum to the sparge.








5 gallons was fermented with WLP023 Burton Ale yeast, 14 days primary at 65F


        5 gallons was fermented with WLP860 Munich Helles Lager yeast, 14 days primary at 48F, 14 days secondary at 33F.



After fermentation, I racked the ale version into a keg and added coffee made with an Aeropress. I have had success with using this expresso-like coffee before, and I generally shoot for 12-16oz in a 5gl batch.  I also added 8 oz of black walnut extract. The ale batch was good, but a little thin so I also added ~50g of lactose by dissolving it in the hot coffee.

For the lager portion, I added the remaining ~6 oz of black walnut extract. I was running low on coffee beans so I skipped the Aeropress step. Instead, I simply put the beans (~1/2 cup) I had left into a dry hop bag along with a scoop of raw black walnuts. After "cold steeping" in the keg for a few days the coffee flavor and aroma were phenomenal. Smooth, roasty and delicious. The keg didn't make it through my New Year's party.

Overall, I really enjoy brewing with black walnuts. The flavor contribution, at least in an already complex beer like a stout, is quite subtle. It is hard to describe, but the black walnut extract really increases the richness of the beer along with providing a sort of generic nuttiness. I don't think most people would know that I used black walnuts if I didn't tell them, but I would certainly miss it if it they weren't there.

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