Exploring No Sparge Brewing Techniques With An Oatmeal Stout

Mike has been playing with no sparge brewing techniques for fun in his brewery. This week, we sample an Oatmeal Stout brewed without the sparge step.

Mike has been brewing Oatmeal Stouts for a very long time. Unfortunately, it seems that he always needs to tweak the recipe or the process. Most times, it's just for fun to better understand an ingredient or a process, but his time it was both.

This beer had a relied heavily on Midnight Wheat to drive the dark malt character of the beer. Midnight Wheat is a dehusked dark malt intended to deliver smoother roast character.

Mike also explored Imperial Yeast's A10 Darkness as his yeast in this beer as well as he's never used that one before in an Oatmeal Stout.

The real experiment here was to play with modifying his process to use the equipment he has to do a hybrid no sparge process. In traditional no sparge brewing, all the necessary water to make the final beer is in the mash tun and no additional water is added to rinse the grain at the end of the mash. You just run of the full preboil volume and away you go. In Mike's modified version, he mashed in as usual using a 1.5qt/lb liquor ratio. Then he added enough water to the mash with recirculation to dilute the wort and have all the water needed in the tun but post mash.

We give this beer a taste and see if the results were striking.

Tell us about your experiences with no sparge brewing.
CHEERS!

Recipe:
9.6lb/4.35kg Stout Malt
0.75lb/340g Briess Midnight Wheat 550L
0.5lb/226g Crisp Chocolate Malt 400L
1lb/453g Bairds Medium Crystal 50/60L
1lb/453g Torrified Wheat
4.5oz/128g Pale Chocloate 180L
0.75lb/340g Blonde Roasted Oats
1.25lb/567g Flaked Oats, Instant
1oz/28g Cluster 60min
1.5oz/35g Cluster 10min
A10 Darkness
Mash 152F/67C
OG 1.057
#NoSpargeBrewing #HomebrewingStout #MidnightWheat
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