In “Session Stouts: Big Flavor in Small Packages” (Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®, February/March 2017), Josh Weikert explains that with just a bit of tweaking, you can produce a range of session stouts that preserve the complexity and interest of their full-strength cousins. Here, he runs through a real-life example to illustrate the overall method of “downsizing” a stout to sessionable.
ALL-GRAIN
OG: 1.045
FG: 1.020
IBUs: 45
ABV: 4.4%
Suppose you want a beer that mimicks the flavor and mouthfeel of a certain West Coast–originating Russian imperial stout, but want half the ABV. Assuming you have a good clone recipe to work from (we do), how do you get to a session version?
Our full-strength grist looks something like this (assuming 70 percent mash efficiency):
15 lb (6.8 kg) Maris Otter
1 lb (454 g) British light crystal (35L)
1 lb (454 g) Crystal 120
8 oz (227 g) brown malt
8 oz (227 g) chocolate malt (350L)
4 oz (113 g) roasted barley (500L)
That brings us to an OG of 1.090 and an estimated ABV of just about 9.1 percent. Base malt represents about 82 percent of that grist, and we can forget about hops for the time being. We can adjust the recipe as follows:
6.5 lb (2.9 kg) Maris Otter
12 oz (340 g) British light crystal (35L)
12 oz (340 g) Crystal 120
8 oz (227 g) brown malt
4.8 oz (136 g) chocolate malt (350L)
3 oz (85 g) roasted barley (500L)
8 oz (227 g) flaked barley
We’ve reduced our base malt from 82 percent of the grist to just 68 percent, but don’t sweat it. We’ve preserved most of our crystal malts intact, although in an effort to promote a velvety texture, we’ve sacrificed a half pound (227 g) of crystal malts for half a pound (227 g) of flaked barley. This is a judgment call, though, and you can adjust (or use a different cereal grain) to taste, if you prefer! And if you find that you have a beer that’s not quite as dark as the original, you can add 4 oz (113 g) of a debittered/dehusked malt such as Midnight Wheat to adjust the color (though you may just choose to ignore it). But at the end of the day, we now have an OG of 1.045 and a predicted ABV of only 4.4 percent, and the flavor profile will still be aggressively roasty and rich.
Mash at a higher-than-usual temperature (155°F/68°C) to amp up the proportion of long-chain, unfermentable/hard-to-ferment sugars in your wort.
Now it’s time to think about hops. This, too, is an exercise in “change this, not that.” You’ll want to reduce the overall IBUs to the same ratio as in the original full-strength recipe. This beer clocks in at 85 IBUs in its “big” form, but that would blow away the smaller version. The IBU:OG ratio in the original beer is about 1:1, though, and that’s what we want to replicate. So, for this beer, adjust your overall IBUs to 45 by limiting the 60-minute hops addition and preserving the original late-hopping schedule (which in this case is 1 oz/28 g each of Northern Brewer and Centennial at the 2-minute mark). Even if this beer comes across as overly hoppy in the nose when it’s young, that character will fade as it ages, which is also when the malt characters will come more to the fore. That means that you can age this beer just as you would a high-gravity version.
And as for yeast, use your go-to ale yeast and treat it as you normally do (my preference is Wyeast 1007, German Ale, fermented at 64°F/18°C).