Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Oat Beer: Part 1

Oat beer has a very bad reputation, due to stories going around about how astringent it is, and how it caused sailors to mutiny when they were forced to drink it. But surely nowadays with the advances in malting technology and with hulled oats available at every grocery store in the country this shouldn't be the case anymore, right?

Well, there's only one way to find out, so I decided to create another 1-gallon test batch of oat beer. The grist was 60% Weyermann Vienna malt, with the other 40% being rolled oats from the grocery store. I did a cereal mash with the oats to ensure that the starches were fully available, then mashed in at 100F and added boiling water to get to 155F. Efficiency was lower than I expected, but I still haven't gotten everything dialed in completely on these 1-gallon batches. I used part of my S-04 yeast cake from my pumpkin beer to ferment this oat beer, and in a few weeks I should see how it tastes. Hope it's not too bad.

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