Craft Beer & Brewing Library

Brewing Flavorful Stouts Big and Small with Maplewood (Audio)

If you'd like to watch the video, head to this link: https://beerandbrewing.com/video-course-maplewood/

In this 98-minute course, Maplewood’s founding brewer and CEO Adam Cieslak joins head brewer Roger Cuzelis and special projects lead Adam Smith to detail their approach to building these stouts, including:

• desiging grists for stouts of varying strengths
• different base malts for smaller or barrel-aged stouts
• dialing in water and mash pH to buffer the acidity of dark malts
• mash temperatures that balance big body with fermentability
• long boils for stouts small and large
• layering flavors into smaller stouts
• balancing higher-gravity and barrel-aged stouts
• adjusting base stout recipes to balance flavor adjuncts
• aiming for very high starting gravities and getting more from a massive mash
• adding malt extracts and sugars for even more gravity
• managing fermentation to ensure adequate attenuation in big stouts
• barrel-aging, from sourcing barrels to adjusting recipes to aging and blending
• considerations for coffee, vanilla, and various other flavor adjuncts
• ensuring flavor extraction from adjuncts