What is The Lusty Owauku?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been researching for The Lusty Owauku, trying to nail down exactly what I want to do with this beer. I’ve explored many avenues, because, well, I want to get this right.
Now, I said that I’d have my ingredient list ready. I’ve gone one better: I have three lists ready.
My baseline for this beer will be Northern Brewer’s Imperial Stout Extract Kit. This is, as it stands, a monstrous beer recipe. Using a beer recipe calculator, the standard recipe produces a beer with 8.8% alcohol! That’s twice as strong as anything I have yet brewed. But, why settle for a run-of-the-mill imperial stout? We want to make The Lusty Owauku stand out!
So, let’s add a bunch of crap to it and see what happens.
My original notion for this beer was to add some heat. Imperial stouts are syrupy-sweet, usually, so they should lend themselves well to adding a bit of heat. It is also my hope that the heat will complement the hop flavor in this beer, but who the hell knows, right?
So, the plan will be to add a single Habanero pepper to the recipe. Specifically, it will be halved and seeded, at added to the beer for the last five days of fermentation. Alcohol actually helps extract the various scorching hot oils from the pepper, meaning that the longer it sits, the hotter the beer gets. Posts I’ve read on the interwebs suggest that you leave the pepper in for no longer than a week, lest you make your beer intolerably hot.
And, were I to leave it at that, I’d have a pretty awesome beer, I’d think. A Habanero-infused imperial stout sounds like one of those weird specialty beers for which you’d expect to pay twelve bucks a bottle. But, god dang it, it just needs more.
Northern Brewer has something interesting on their front page: rye malt extract. Making beer with rye is similar to making beer with wheat, in that both tend to contribute spritzy, spicy flavors–though rye is said to be a little earthier overall.
You can predict where this is heading.
So the first thing I decided to find out was if anyone, anywhere, had ever made a stout with rye. As it turns out, yes. And Bell’s brewery is perhaps the best beer I can’t get here in New Jersey, so I figure we’re good to go on that end. It’s not an imperial stout, but we’re certainly not in totally uncharted waters.
This raises the final problem: do I substitute the rye malt for some of the dark malt, or do I just add it? In the case of the former, the beer recipe calculator suggests that such would raise the final alcohol content up to perhaps 9%. Impressive, but will it upset the balance of the beer? Remember, imperial stouts are strongly hopped, in absolute terms. You just tend not to notice it, as the malts are so dominating.
So, we come to the final possible case: simply add 3.3 pounds of rye malt extract on top of the 12 pounds of dark malt extract and the specialty grains. Doing so results in an astonishing 10.4% alcohol by volume, according to the beer calculator. Surely, that is enough to best even the mighty Sam Sykes? It also, I suspect, upsets the final balance of the beer to the malty, perhaps irredeemably so. Accordingly, I plan on adding up to another half ounce of boiling hops to manage this monster–the final amount will depend on how much water I use in the boil, but we’ll talk about that in more depth in an upcoming post.
So, the final recipe for The Lusty Owauku is:
- 12 lb Dark Malt Extract Syrup
- 3.3 lb Rye Malt Extract Syrup
- 0.5 lb Black Patent Malt
- 0.5 lb Chocolate Malt
- 0.5 lb Roasted Barley
- Up to 2.5 Oz Summit hops (boil)
- 2 Oz Cascade Hops (finishing)
- 1 halved and seeded Habanero pepper (last 5 days of fermentation)
The fermentation process will take approximately 4 months. I plan on leaving the beer bottled for 4 weeks before trying, so total time from boil to glass is about 5 months. For a high-alcohol beer like this one, that’s perfectly reasonable and acceptable. In theory, if there’s no contamination or such, and the bottles are stored in a cool, dry, dark place, this beer could last several years.
But, of course, that kind of defeats the purpose, now doesn’t it? Regardless, we have our recipe. Up next, we shall examine the additional equipment I’m going to use to bring The Lusty Owauku to life.
