The satisfaction, pride, and excitement that comes from designing a new recipe is a premiere perk for any brewer, but how do you get there? Take a look at how Rabid's latest stout recipe was written.
12-04-2024 - By Tobias Cichon
The Brewer's Association, as of 2024, recognizes 8 different stout styles: Cream, Oatmeal, British-Style Imperial, Irish Style Dry, Export Style, American-Style, American Style Imperial, and Dessert stouts. Outside of that list, there's the Blonde or White stout debate and a few other claims. Milk stouts can fall into the Cream category while Milkshake stouts are firmly in the Dessert stouts category. Any of these can be barrel aged. The closest unifying characteristic among all of these stouts is the flavor of a heavily kilned malt that typically is reminiscent of coffee and chocolate.
In typical Rabid fashion, the stout we brewed today, codenamed Vantasia, doesn't quite fit into any of those categories, coming closest to meeting the specifications of both an American-Style and an American-Style Imperial, primarily because of the lower IBU (International Bitterness Unit) target rating of 35.
When I write new beer recipes, I first imagine what I want the outcome to be, then review any recipes that I've already done that come close, as needed I will also review recipes online that claim to get to where I want, and then I toss half of that out and try something else based on personal experience or an informed notion of how something might work.
For Vantasia, I wanted a straight stout with muscle, luxurious mouthfeel, and zero reliance on additions like cacao or coffee. I started with the base recipe for Shadowstepper, our chocolate milk stout, thinking I would just cut out the cacao and lactose sugar. While looking at the remaining grain bill, there was something I noticed: without the lactose sugar, some of the grains involved might create an undesired astringency. It was time to buck tradition and excise the most traditional of stout adjunct grains, the roasted barley and chocolate malts, and try replacing them with midnight wheat.
The midnight wheat provides a much smoother experience with less acidity coming through that is often found in other dark roasts. Despite it being wheat, it also manages to achieve similar flavors to roasted barley without dragging the beer into whitbier flavor territory. At a mere 9% of the total grain bill, the midnight wheat still clocks this 8% stout into a 50 SRM (Standard Reference Method) color rating, 10 points higher than the pitch black of Imperial stouts.
I went with some classic hop choices of Warrior and East Kent Goldings known for clean bittering and a mild woodiness. Beyond that it was a matter of tuning the recipe to meet desired outcomes, but honestly, a lot of that is dependent on what we can put into the beer in the increments they're sold, such as 55 pound sacks of grain.
The final step in creating a recipe is giving it a name, even if it's temporary. The color of blacker than black is where the codename "Vantasia" comes in, deriving from the words "fantasia" and "vanta" -- a paint color known for absorbing so much light it looks like a hole in reality.
Codename: Vantasia is expected to be released on December 20th, 2024.
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