Coffee Stout

On February 7, 2010 I brewed another batch of Coffee Stout. This beer is brewed with chocolate malt, coffee malt, roasted barley, and flaked oats. Today I plan on transferring the beer over to a secondary carboy and adding cold pressed coffee from Caribou Coffee. This batch is also much lighter at around 6% ABV than my last attempt at making this beer which was 7.5% ABV with maltodextrin added for a bigger body. The "C2" coffee beer that many of you got for Christmas I fear never properly carbonated in the bottles. Right now my beer is carbonated through a process called "bottle conditioning" where the bottles carbonate slowly over time. Bottle conditioning works by adding extra sugar to the beer right before it bottles. I use approximately 5 ounces of corn sugar for my 5 gallon batches. Once bottled, the remaining yeast in the beer process the new corn sugar and the byproducts are alcohol and carbon dioxide. Bottle conditioning can be somewhat tricky as you have a number of variables (amount of available sugar, healthy yeast in the bottle, temperature of bottles while cellaring, length of time bottles have been condition, etc...) that make the process somewhat unpredictable. You can see why kegging a beer is so much simple! At any rate, my guess with the last version of the Coffee Stout is that I made a beer that was too big, didn't pitch the proper amount of yeast (using the stir plate and making a starter) and so by the time it came to bottling I had a lot of dead/stressed yeast. Of course, it also could have been something as simple as forgetting to add the corn sugar. Since this happened to what is one of my favorite homebrewed beers, I take this as a lesson learned regarding proper brewing techniques and maybe even more importantly proper note taking!