A beer is a just a beer, but a stout is more like a meal!

Yesterday (with some trepidation) I chilled and tasted the stout that I recently made. Part of the trepidation is the "recently" part -- the recipe I followed calls for a single ferment stage of two weeks, and then two weeks bottle conditioning.  I really doubted that a stout would come out with such a short rack.  The other part of the trepidation was that when I took the specific gravity reading at bottling time, I ended up with a net expected alcohol content of only 3%.  If true, what I ended up with was definitely not going to be "stout". But I bullied on, bottled it up, and let it sit.

When I opened the bottle, I was greeted with a good stout aroma, which gave me hope.  I poured it into a pint glass and LO! A lovely stout head formed, and stuck around for a pretty good time for a non-nitrogen pour. My heart lifted as I took a sip -- and was rewarded with a lovely flavor.  Feeling much better about it, I sat down to enjoy the glass.  By the end, I decided that I must have made a mistake on one of the readings, because there was definitely more than 3% alcohol in that glass. Joy!

The recipe is "Ms Bessy's Moo-Moo Milk Stout" from The Brewmaster's Bible, a marvelous book with a load of information for the aspiring brewer and a ton of beer recipes for every style of beer. The name is an intentionally silly reference to the addition of lactose to the brew to give it a creamy mouth feel. I think it also does a nice job of arresting some of the sharp roastiness (that coffee-like flavor) of many stouts. The only variation I made to the recipe was because I couldn't get unhopped dark malt extract, so I used hopped extract and reduced the additional hops down to 1 oz.

So now my beverage fridge is filled with the brown ale from last month plus this stout.  In another two weeks there will be a new batch of cider to chill as well. It's going to get a bit crowded in there!