Maybe I’m not as suave as the guys from Swingers, but I am up a “hundy” after an afternoon of blackjack. Plus, free Amstel Light.

Maybe I am money after all.

As you may be aware, Oktoberfest is underway in Munich right now. Since we are 6000 miles (or 10,000 km) away celebrating our anniversary, whata coincidence that the world’s only sanctioned “HB” HofbrauHaus in the world is one block from our hotel here in Las Vegas?

The Oktoberfest beer is tapped, and is here direct from Munich for the occasion. Malty and golden, this one is “echt Deutsch”.

Ein, zwei, zuffa!

We’re at the East Atlanta Strut today, and stopped by La Casita for lunch. We were pleasantly surprised to find $10 pitchers of Sweetwater’s Summer Hummer served in 1/2 gallon growlers. Get them while you can today!

You can never have too much stout for wintertime. Here is a great imperial stout recipe that is complex and very drinkable.

For 5 gallons (80% efficiency):

Grain
9.00 lbs. Pale Malt (2-row)
1.25 lbs. CaraMunich 40
1.00 lbs. Roasted Barley
1.00 lbs. Special B Malt
1.00 lbs. Vienna Malt
0.50 lbs. Chocolate Malt
0.50 lbs. Special Roast Malt
0.13 lbs. Carafa

Additions (for .75 gallons)
Variant #1: 12 oz. frozen raspberries
Variant #2: 50ml of homemade bourbon vanilla extract (see details below)

Hops
0.60 oz. Pacific Gem (organic) (16.5%) 60 min.

Yeast
White Labs WLP001 American Ale

Mash grains at 153F for 60 minutes. Add all hops when wort begins to boil. After 45 minutes, add Irish moss. After 15 more minutes, knockout to chiller, and pitch yeast. Will be in primary fermentation for up to 7 days, and then either go with a 1 week secondary fermentation (regular version), or make your additions to the secondary and let it go for another 10 days.

OG: 1.079 (19.1P)
Anticipated SRM: 43.8
Anticipated IBU: 38.7

Packaging
Primed with Primetabs and bottled in 12 and 22 oz. bottles

Production + Tasting Notes
Once in a while you get more sugar out of your grain that you expected. Since I was already using an 80% efficiciency setting for this recipe, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself with more points in the kettle than I expected. Rather than making 5 gallons of stronger beer, I opted to keep 5 gallons as is, and take the remaining 1.5 gallons and experiment.

Variation 1: Raspberry Imperial Stout. I added 12 oz of frozen raspberries (thawed and pureed) to a 1 gallon growler with 3/4 gallon of wort. After 9 days, it was bottled.

Variation 2: Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Stout. I split 1/2 of a madagascar vanilla bean (thanks, Penzey’s!) and soaked it in a enlermeyer flask filled with 125ml of Jim Beam (white label) for 1 week. This homemade vanilla extract was then used for the addition to the other gallon growler. I started adding it 25 ml at a time to see how it would meld in with the stout. I stopped after adding 50ml to the growler.