Well before autumn, I like to start brewing my fall “party” beers—and that brings us to one of my favorite styles: Irish-style extra stout. It shares a lot of DNA with its lighter cousin, the dry stout, but this one gets an extra bump of strength, with deeper coffee and dark-chocolate flavors that make it a great seasonal beer.
However, there’s more to it than just increasing your gravity—and there is a roasty pitfall to avoid.
Style
Some might say that dividing stouts into all these subcategories goes a bit too far, but despite their commonalities—yes, they’re all black and roasty—there are some prominent differences. In this case, we’re looking at mid-range ABV—more than dry stout, but much less than imperial. We should also be tasting more coffee and chocolate than we get in the dry stout—yet it shouldn’t be as sweet as milk stouts or as full-bodied as oatmeal stouts. We’ll also rely mainly on our malt flavors and not on our hops—let’s leave that to American stout—except for a balancing bitterness. Dark? Yes. Roasty? Sure. Yet those baseline similarities are far less important than the differences. A horse isn’t a zebra.
Ingredients
Let’s start with a big dose of Maris Otter for a nice bready background. (If you’re more of a “biscuit” fan, I wouldn’t see the harm in splitting this 50/50 with pilsner.) Atop the base, we’ll add modest layers of crystal, at 40° and 80°L, and (of course) roasted barley. If you have access to the British crystal malts, I wholeheartedly recommend them—don’t worry if the Lovibond numbers are a little different. Finally, instead of a pale or traditional chocolate malt, I use a bit of chocolate rye. It sits better on the palate—we want to avoid excessive roast, which this malt seems to avoid thanks to its lack of husk. It also adds some pleasant spicy notes with a nice cocoa flavor, adding interesting depth. Plus, we’re already getting plenty of coffee flavor from the roasted barley.
Hops are simple: any you like, at the top of the boil, starting around 30 IBUs. You can increase that in subsequent batches if the beer seems too sweet, but you want to avoid sharp bitterness—we want soft, refined roast with good balancing bitterness, not something that is teeth-rippingly bitter. Finally, I use the same German Ale yeast as I do in my lighter stout, and for the same reason: good attenuation, light esters in an otherwise clean fermentation, and a good background for the roast flavors.
Process
Despite the chocolate flavors, the process itself is pretty vanilla. You can go with a standard 152°F (67°C) mash—but it’s not a bad idea to watch your mash pH because roasted malts are acidic. (Know your water and aim for a mash pH of about 5.5–5.6 if possible; if you need to adjust upward, slaked lime can add alkalinity.) Boil, chill, aerate, and pitch as usual. Fermenting at 65°F (18°C) then an uptick to 68°F (20°C) or so will help clean up diacetyl precursors.
All told, fermentation should go quickly; I’ve had this beer in the keg in fewer than 10 days.