Oatmeal Cookie Ale

LTHD set up at Dr. Gonzo's

After last Saturday's busy day with Learn to Homebrew Day, I brewed again on Friday.  Now it's the Oatmeal Cookie Ale.

To recap... last weekend I brewed at Dr. Gonzo's Uncommon Condiments with several other enthusiasts for the AHA's Learn to Homebrew Day.  I demonstrated by brewing a five gallon English Bitter extract kit for the beginners. We began about 12:00 and we were done with that batch at around 1:45 PM. For lunch I grilled some burgers over charcoal and we adorned them with some of the good Doctor's Condiments: Garlic Mash, Drunk Stunt Mustard and Big Jerk Sauce. 

Matt and Demase, fellow home brewers at LTHD

We got back to work after the hour break by making a three gallon batch of "Hodge-Podge" beer with some leftover ingredients I had like a 3.3 pound can of Czech Pilsener extract, about a half pound of Candi sugar, a bit of corn sugar, a dash of coriander and some Sazz hops.  This demonstration showed that once you master how to brew a kit you can advance by creating your own recipes using extracts.  The next level of brewing is with partial mash kits, then partial mash your own recipes with the pinnacle of brewing... the all-grain batch.

The beer I made Friday was the Oatmeal Cookie Ale.  The holiday season is upon us and we need a festive beer to drink under the tannenbaum.  This year I moving away from any “Wassail” style of heavier bodied winter warmers with orange, clove and Dickensian flavors that I love so much and going towards comfort flavors and spices such as toasted oatmeal, raisins, cinnamon and vanilla.

This recipe rises off the pages of “Radical Brewing” by Randy Mosher. I've added raisins to the recipe to get that unctuous flavor.  I also made my own dark brown sugar by mixing the proportions of 1 cup of cane sugar to 2 tbsp of molasses. The recipe calls for 10 oz. of dark brown sugar which is almost 2 cups loosely packed and I added 4 tbsp. of molasses plus an extra tablespoon to make it dark brown sugar.
 

This ale  should have an O.G. of 1.056 and a F.G. of 1.014 resulting in a 5.53% ABV from using White Labs WLP006 Bedford British Ale specialty yeast. Northern Brewer hops at 9.8% AA were used for bittering and East Kent Golding hops 5.0% AA were added for aroma with 5 minutes left in the boil, giving us a bitterness of  29.0 IBU. The Brown malt, toasted oatmeal, dark brown sugar and the 90 minute boil time produce a medium brown color at 18.8 SRM.  This beer will be categorized as 10-C American Brown Ale.

Please feel free to comment on any post by going to the blog entry and click on comment. The entire recipe can be found on my site's recipe page.