Stout with Amber Malt

I had used brown malt before in a mild. I loved the flavour of that in combination with a lot of crystal malt, so I decided to use some of its cousin, amber malt.

I wanted to brew a simple stout to test my beer engine. As such, I came up with a beer that was 70 % lager malt, 10 % amber (Crisp), 10 % flaked corn and 10 % roasted barley.

Having messed about with mixed fermentation beers for the last year, and realising that I only really enjoyed the low gravity saison type beers, I was glad to get back to clean beers for a bit.

I cultured some yeast from a bottle of proper job, a St Austell brewery beer. This was then top cropped from a previous batch of bitter. I love this yeast. All I read about it is that it's fairly clean with mineral notes, but I always get a deeply pleasing apricot hum at the start of a sip.

The beer was 1.040 OG to probably something like 1.012.

Hops were a combination of Bramilng X and Willamette. These were added at 45 mins and 15 respectively for 30 IBU total. I would have liked to have gone higher, but didn't have enough time or hops.

The beer was nice, very silky cocoa impression. Would have been improved by a bit more fruity bitterness. As it was, it came across a little gentle, too  chocolatey. Will just up the hops next time. An alternative would be some dark invert syrup. Clarity was good. Will use flaked corn more to combat haze.

Blended 25 percent Brett pale at serving time into the last bottle. This blend was superb. Knocked off the cocoa impression replacing it with dark chocolate. Good to know.