Beer Forum

I posted a while ago that I planned to make a strawberry stout. It is the first recipe in a long series of recipes that I plan on perfecting. I did not consult a style guide, except the brewmasters warehouse brew builder...although it tells me i am out of style. The ingredients are:

3.5lbs Briess Traditional Dark Dry Extract
2 lbs Briess Traditional Dark Liquid Extract
2 lbs Lactose
1 lb Crisp Chocolate Malt
1 oz Fuggles bittering
1/2 oz cascade flavoring at 30 minutes
1/2 oz cascade at flameout
Whaite Labs California Ale yeast

I am going to put strawberry flavoring after primary fermentation is done.

Sounds pimp, right?

Sure is alot of lactose.
Ice cream topping comes to mind, That sucker going to be super, uber, duper sweet!

That's a lot of dark, when I was still doing extract I would avoid using too much dark mark extract, use your specialty malts to get the color/flavor.

+1

Use pale extract if you can. Then steep the dark grains. This will give you greater control over this beer moving forward when it comes to dialing in malt flavors.

Mills

Yeah it sounds like it has potential to be a hybrid strawberry milkshake/sweet stout. With over 20% of your grist being Milk Sugar (Lactose), the yeast are going to leave the galactose portion of the milk sugar in suspension. When that happens the Galactose will likely bond to other protein molecules forming glycoproteins and giving you a creamy beer. I would cut your lactose amount in half.

Also in general using liquid extract will give you a darker SRM than you may be shooting for. You should be able to get away with using the pale extract like Mills mentioned.

Let us know how it turns out

Also you might want to take a look at your hop bill. If you are looking for the strawberry to show, you do not want to make it compete with hop aromas. Think of a single high alpha acid bittering hop for all of your IBU. Think magnum, horizon, something like that. Just a suggestion.

Mills

Hell yeah, thanks for the awesome suggestions. I will take them all into account the next time I attempt to brew this recipe.