Unleashing the Fury Part II: Star Wars Beer (Chocolate Death)
Categories: Featured, Home Beer Brewing
Written By: beer_scientist
A big ass Imperial Stout by any other name is just as huge. I set out over three months ago to beat Tactical Nuclear Penguin, thinking it would be the strongest beer in the world for a little while. Boy, was I wrong. But I’ve learned a lot in the process and am determined to scratch the surface of beating the new champion…I’ve got a few ways to improve my process next time around. As for now, I’m writing an account of how I made my huge Imperial Stout and letting you know how the great experiment turned out. Here’s the first post for anyone who is interested.
Let me provide a caveat to the whole story by telling you that the small beer I made from this brew was 9.5% ABV. What’s that mean? It means I collected a lot of sugar from the second runnings, which means I only took the sweetest stuff from the mashes. Also, let me inform you that I have a capacity limit of 15 pounds of grain in my mash ton and that I had 45 pounds of grain for the brew. What’s that mean? 3 mashes+ 3 second runnings+ 2 beers= a 16 hour brew day. I was truly worn out by the end of it.
Now that the caveat is over, let me talk a bit about the brew day. Sorry, I’m not going to give the recipe details just yet. Here is what I will tell you: my final gravity for the beer was 1.236, which meant that enough sugar was in the solution to make a beer of 31-31 1/2% ABV. That’s not a typo, the beer was as thick as syrup (the really high initial gravity was one of my early mistakes). My final gravity was actually higher than most starting gravities. Let me put it in these terms: 1.092 was my final gravity and that means the sugar left in the beer still had enough power to produce a beer between 11 and 12%. Of course, this wasn’t possible because the yeast couldn’t keep living under such conditions. As it stood, the beer finished at roughly 20.3760% ABV. There are several questions I have to answer in order to make this believable.
First, how did I determine the reading since a normal hydrometer will not go that high on a gravity measurement? Well, you are right to ask the question. The most basic terms of understanding a hydrometer is this: a hydrometer measures in a solution whatever isn’t water. Basically, water at 60º Fahrenheit measures 1.000 on the scale. So, the more you saturate a solution, the more buoyant the hydrometer becomes. Displacement is the key.
For a solution that cannot be measured under normal circumstances, one only needs to figure out a way to measure the saturation to water level. If that level is too high, the hydrometer will be displaced beyond the stage of a viable reading. However, I came up with a way to find my reading. Why not take half wort and half water? I mean, the measurement is based on the concept of displacement. I took 50% wort and 50% water, stirred it together, and took my reading. Since I cut the solution by half, I multiplied the reading by 2. That gave me my gravity; it made sense to me.
Secondly, what about the ABV? Doesn’t brewers’ yeast achieve a maximum of maybe 15% ABV? Well, that might be true and you could disqualify what I did simply based on that…but you wouldn’t begrudge me that, would you? What did I use? I started with a London Ale yeast. All my yeasts were big starters. That got me to about 12% ABV and then I used my Trappist yeast for another 3%. Great, I now had a thick 15% beer. It was still so thick that it was oily. It was a beast. That was probably a mistake on my part. I should have started with less sugars and fed the beast gradually. A gradual build would have left the beer thinner and achieved my goals. Plus, the extra sugar created a thicker beer with less absorption power (I’m talking hop acids) but also a less functional environment for the yeast. Beer has a harder time in a thicker solution. Not to worry, I also had some other yeasts that could be employed in the service of making the beast.
But, for now, let me say that the beer achieved 15%, and the story is far from over. Please read the next few posts to find out what happened.
March 19th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Interesting stuff! – live and learn!
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March 19th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
There’s more on the way.
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March 19th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Mike, this is fascinating! I’m really looking forward to what else you’ve done and reading the recipe, if you publish it. Keep it coming. Are you going to freeze distill?
ROCK ON!
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March 19th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
I am doing that (freeze distilling) as we speak. I’ll send you one of “normal” bottles. Of course, it’s still huge. You’ll find out how huge tomorrow. If you like it, I’ll be happy to send you the recipe. Just guard it…it may be proprietary at some point. I’m thinking of bringing the end result to Dark Lord Day I wish you were going to be there. Right now I’m figuring on getting two 12 ounces bottles of the finished beer. If I can find some smaller (6 ounce) bottles, I’ll send you one of the four end beers.
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March 19th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Awesome! Looking forward to it. I wish I was going to DLD too, but it falls on Daddy / Daughter weekend. Maybe next year.
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March 19th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Family is family. Part of the reason I’m going is because my family lives a couple hours away and I get to be with them. I don’t know that I would have gone otherwise.
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March 20th, 2010 at 7:44 am
Mike this is very interesting. A lot of the brewer specifics kinda went over my head, but my question is will you have Molasses when you are done? Sounds really thick. Also are you shooting for 30-30.5% ABV, or is that where it is now and the final product will be bigger? Finally, the Eisbocking is very intriguing to me. In the Brew dog film they used a freezer that got to around 30 below zero. How are you freezing your beer? Are you using dry ice to complement the freezer as well?
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beer_scientist Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 9:27 am
Sorry about the specifics going over your head. I was already writing a lot of stuff, so I didn’t want to make it too huge a post. Even with the specifics, you still got where I was goig with it, so that’s good. I won’t have Molasses or beer concentrate when I’m done. It will be thick but I’ve been sipping on a few of the regular/unbourboned bottles, which are thicker than the bourbon ones, and they are very nice. The reason that it doesn’t seem quite so thick is because of that high ABV, it has that thinning effect. Either way, I’m not too worried about that part of the process (although you ask a good one).
I’m shooting for higher than 30-30.5. I actually started out shooting for a little higher than TNP, which is 32%. Trust me, that’s a difficult proposition. I’m going to post some more about where it ends up and my process in more post, so I’m saving that (I hate to be so coy). Again, the eisbocking question is a good one. I was able to achieve about 7 below in my freezer. I’m not using dry ice because I don’t want to buy it. I thought about it and Nate mentioned it as well…I just wanted to try it straight up and see what happened. However, I’ve still seen some good freezing as a result of doing it. Ideally, it would be a little cold because it would speed up the process. I think the freezing component has been the most frustrating aspect to the whole beer.
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March 20th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
[...] Last time, I left off by noting that my beer was chugging along nicely. However, I had reached the upper limits of the yeast type that I used, so what was I to do? Did you know that WLP 1099 has a fermentation potential of 25% ABV? That’s crazy. I didn’t add this at first because I wanted to really focus on normal yeasts as the backbone of the beer. However, as I mentioned before, I realized that I would not reach that goal because of wort viscosity (i.e., it was too thick). However, I knew that I could get it higher than it was, so I embarked on making the alcohol climb to a higher percent. What else could I do? [...]