Oatmeal Stout All Grain Recipe

Simple Style Guide: Oatmeal Stout

Oatmeal Stout All Grain

In the world of stouts, Irish stouts are dry and milk stouts are sweet, but oatmeal stouts fall somewhere in the middle. The use of a small amount of oats in the grist give this roasty brew a smooth, somewhat creamy mouthfeel. This is, in essence, what you are looking for when making an oatmeal stout.

Topping Serious Eats list of Top 5 Oatmeal Stouts, Samuel Smiths Oatmeal Stout is a classic. Rich and luscious, flavors of toasted malt and chocolate combine with oats for a smooth finish. A similar beer is made by Highland Brewing Company in Asheville, NC, an excellent oatmeal porter. Flaked oats give the beer a smooth, silky character. 5.9% ABV, 35 IBUs using American hops, Chinook, Willamette, and Cascade. These are two great examples to seek out when crafting your oatmeal stout recipe.

Brewing an Oatmeal Dry Stout

Grain Bill and Fermentables

An oatmeal stout gets its dark color from specialty grains like chocolate malt and roasted barley. Roasted barley helps to impart the dry, bitter flavor of coffee that stouts are known for, but it must be used sparingly . Reduce the roasted barley in favor of chocolate malt to avoid overly burnt or charcoal flavors.

To accentuate the oatmeal character, Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer John recommend, Toasting the oats in the oven at around 300°F until they begin to slightly color up and give off a nutty oatmeal cookie character.

Hops

Yeast

Now youre ready to make your own oatmeal stout!

My Oatmeal Stout Recipe

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Make Your Best Oatmeal Stout

Bring out the Oatmeal Stout when you want a beer thats not bone dry, not intensely roasty, not saccharine-sweet, and not overly alcoholicbut still clearly a stout. Heres how to make your best.

Josh WeikertJun 18, 2017 – 6 min read

When you want to make a stout but you know the people drinking it arent roast heads , you might be tempted to go with the Sweet Stout. That can make for a beer thats too dessert-like and/or a poor fit for warmer weather, though. A better option is to trot out a beer thats not bone dry, not intensely roasty, not saccharine-sweet, and not overly alcoholicbut still clearly a stout. Its Oatmeal Stout time.

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Brewing An Oatmeal Stout

The grain bill for an oatmeal stout typically starts with UK or American pale malt, which generally comprises about 60-80% of the grain bill. Oats are the next major component, making up 5%-25% of the bill in most recipes, though some extreme examples use as much as 30% oats. I personally recommend targeting the 10% oats to start with.

A variety of grains are often added to enhance body and complexity including Caramel/Crystal malts, Cara-Pils, Cara-Foram malt, flaked barley, and occasionally even wheat or flaked wheat. These typically are included in the 5-10% weight range. When using Caramel/Crystal malts, the darker versions are often favored to add color and caramel sweetness to the beer.

The stout character and color is usually achieved by using Chocolate malt and Black Patent malt . These are typically constrained to 4-10% of the grain bill to achieve a stout character without creating an overwhelming roasted coffee flavor, as oatmeal stout should be in the sweet stout family, and not dry like Irish stout. Stout roast and roasted barley is generally not used in oatmeal stout as it adds too much coffee or burnt flavor to the mix.

Fermentation is done at normal ale temperatures and the beer may be bottled or kegged. Traditional stouts are served with fairly low carbonation and warm, but many American drinkers prefer a moderate carbonation and chilled beer.

Examples Of The Style

Chocolate Oatmeal Stout All Grain Recipe Kit

R & R Oatmeal Stout from Beaver Street Brewery Great American Beer Festival Winner, Gold, 2015. Available: Year Round at Whistle Stop Cafe.
Scripps Pier Stout from South Park Brewing Great American Beer Festival Winner, Silver, 2015. Available: Year Round at South Park Brewing.
Scaredy Cat from Vintage Brewing Company Great American Beer Festival Winner, Bronze, 2015. Available: At Vintage Brewing.
Gold Medal Oatmeal Stout from Blue Corn Brewing Company Great American Beer Festival Winner, Gold, 2014. Available: On tap at Blue Corn Cafe.
Dark Side of the Pint from Four Seasons Brewing Company Great American Beer Festival Winner, Silver, 2014. Available: Year Round on tap across Pennsylvania.
Backside Stout from Steamworks Brewing Company Great American Beer Festival Winner, Bronze, 2014. Available: Year Round at Steamworks.
Sless Oatmeal Stout from Iron Springs Pub and Brewery World Beer Cup Winner, 2014, Gold. Available: Bottles, Year Round.
Pure Imagination from Verboten Brewing Company World Beer Cup Winner, 2014, Silver. Available: Available several places in Colorado.
Beer For My Horses from Cazuelas Mexican Grill and Brewpub World Beer Cup Winner, 2014, Bronze. Available: Year Round on tap at brewpub.

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A Classic Oatmeal Stout

There is something about winter that demands warmth and comfort, hearty flavors, and earthiness. It is the perfect season for brewing a nice dark oatmeal stout.

While generally, I brew wholegrain beer, this recipe uses a combination of malt extract and malted grains.

Dark beers require more malt to achieve higher alcohol levels and deep taste and color. In an average homebrewing mash tun there just isnt enough space to hold all the grain required to make a good strong wort.

Danado De Bom Oatmeal Stout

ABV: 4.20%

The following beer recipe is featured in the January/February 2009 issue of Zymurgymagazine. Access this issue along with the archives with Zymurgy Online!

After hopping from brewery to brewery in Singapore in 2009, Charlie Papazian got inspired to make this damn good oatmeal stout based on his experience at Brewerkz Riverside Point. Charlie assures that any beer lover should make this spot a destination as soon as they hit the ground in Singapore. This version has a smooth, velvety texture and a creamy brown head. When you put this one up to your nose, you’ll get a light cocoa and coffee flavor with subtle enhancement of aroma hops. Just over 4% alcohol by volume, this beer is truly for all seasons and surprisingly refreshing, even in the warmth of summer.

This recipe was originally featured in the 2009 January/February issue of Zymurgy magazine. Join the American Homebrewers Association to gain access to the Zymurgy digital archive.

Brewed

Brewed 4 times

The following beer recipe is featured in the January/February 2009 issue of Zymurgymagazine. Access this issue along with the archives with Zymurgy Online!

This recipe was originally featured in the 2009 January/February issue of Zymurgy magazine. Join the American Homebrewers Association to gain access to the Zymurgy digital archive.

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Recipe: Snowfall Oatmeal Stout

The style allows for creativity, which means that you can choose to dress up whichever part of the profile you prefer, making the beer sweeter, more bitter, less roasty, or more oaty, as you like it.

Josh WeikertDec 23, 2019 – 2 min read

All Access Subscribers can download the Beersmith and BeerXML version of this recipe.

ALL-GRAINBatch size: 5 gallons Brewhouse efficiency: 72%

5 lb Maris Otter 1 lb of 10L Munich malt 1 lb flaked oats 1 lb Victory malt 1 lb pale chocolate malt 8 oz British crystal malt 8 oz Midnight Wheat

HOPS SCHEDULE0.5 oz Nugget at 60 minutes 1 oz Fuggles at 10 minutes

YEASTWyeast 1318

DIRECTIONSMill the grains and mix with 3.1 gallons of 163°F strike water to reach a mash temperature of 154°F . Hold this temperature for 60 minutes. Vorlauf until your runnings are clear, then run off into the kettle. Sparge the grains with 4.1 gallons and top up as necessary to obtain 6 gallons of wort. Boil for 60 minutes, following the hops schedule.

After the boil, chill the wort to slightly below fermentation temperature, about 66°F . Aerate the wort with pure oxygen or filtered air and pitch the yeast.

Ferment at 66°F until fermentation completes. Upon completion of fermentation, crash the beer to 35°F , then bottle or keg and carbonate to approximately 2.25 volumes.

The History Of Oatmeal Stout

Homebrewing Oatmeal Milk Stout All Grain BIAB Tasting

As mentioned in my earlier article on Dry Irish Stout, as well as my podcast on Irish Stout with John Palmer, all modern stouts trace their heritage back to Porter, which was an immensely popular drink in the 17th century. As far back as 1677, the term stout was used to describe strong beers, and most beers in that time period were dark ales because malt at the time was kilned over fires true Pale malt did not arrive until the early industrial revolution brought coal fired malting.

The term Stout was used to describe strong beers of various kinds well into the 1800s, and evolved over the century to refer to strong very dark Stout Porters, or simply Stouts. Oatmeal Stout was first widely marketed in the late 1800s as a nutritional drink. The marketing worked well as oats were though to have a restorative, nourishing and healthy effect in Victorian England.

The use of oats in beer was not a modern innovation, however, as oats were widely used for ales in medieval Europe. The use of oats in beer had largely died out by the 16th century, with the exception of Norway where it was still used.

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The Oatmeal Stout Style

Many beer fans are surprised to find that oatmeal stout has very little oatmeal flavor. Instead the oatmeal adds a rich, creamy, silky character to the beer due to the high protein, lipid and gum content. Several early commercial examples included very little oatmeal , though most were made with between 5% and 30% oatmeal by weight. Using more than 30% oatmeal will lead to an astringent flavor and bitterness.

The BJCP style guide describes Oatmeal Stout as a variant of sweet stout that is less sweet, and relies on oatmeal for body and complexity rather than lactose. It may have a roasted grain aroma mixed with a light sweetness, with little fruitiness or diacetyl. Hop aroma and flavor are low, and it may have a slight oatmeal aroma.

Color is medium brown to black , with an original gravity of 1.048-1.065 which results in an alcohol content of 4.2-5.9%. Bitterness is in the 25-40 IBU range, with a bitterness ratio in the 0.5 IBU/GU range.

The Gum Content Of Oats

The thick consistency of an everyday bowl of cooked, breakfast oatmeal results from the high gum content of oats. These gums consist of beta-glucans, which are essentially long chains of many glucose units linked together. The difference between these beta-glucans and starches is in the structure of the bonds between the individual units. In well-modified malted grains, beta-glucan levels are low because these bonds are broken down during the germination phase.

In all-grain oatmeal stouts using 5 to 10 percent oats in the grist, the gumminess of the beta-glucans is usually not excessive, and a single-step infusion mash can be used. However, when using higher percents to get greater smoothness and body, you must reckon with the gums to do an effective sparge. This is done by adding a second temperature step in the mash, called a beta-glucanase rest. The enzyme beta-glucanase works best in the temperature range of 104° F to 122° F. Holding the mash temperature for half an hour in this range before the saccharification rest is sufficient to reduce beta-glucan content significantly.

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How To Add Flavors During The Second Fermentation

The only trick to adding flavors during secondary fermentation is that there is a risk of contaminating the beer with outside yeasts and bacteria.

So always rinse the flavor ingredients for 30 seconds to remove most of the surface bacteria and yeasts. By the time you rack to the second carboy, the alcohol levels of the stout should be high enough to prevent contamination.

Here are some flavors that go well in an oatmeal stout:

Coffee: Brew a strong shot of espresso . Add 1/2 cup of espresso per gallon of stout when transferring to the secondary fermentor.
Chocolate: Add 2 Tbsp of chopped cocoa nibs or cocoa powder per gallon of stout.
Fruit: Prunes, raisins, and dried cherries complement the rich flavors of stout. Only add 2 prunes or 1 Tbsp of raisins to 1 gallon of stout. You dont want to introduce too much extra sugar or it will restart the fermentation.
Vanilla: Add 1 or 2 whole vanilla beans to a gallon stout. Split the vanilla beans in half before adding them to the carboy.
Spiced: Add 1 1/2 tsp of ground spices per gallon of stout. For gingerbread use an equal mix of ginger and cinnamon. For chai use a mix of ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and anise.

5.2 lbs light malt Extract
1.2 lbs Pale 2-row malt
0.8lb. flaked oats

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What Makes It Tick

Were essentially going to pack a little extra holiday weight on a basic sweet stout/oatmeal stout frame. First, extra helpings of base malt to overshoot the stylistic original gravity by a good bit. Then a double whammy of flaked oats and a good percentage of crystal malt in the grist, plus lactose in the boil will collectively create a silken texture, full body, and chewy, viscous finish.

Its a stout, so obviously we need a healthy amount of roasted grains for the black color and required roasty, espresso-like quality. The baking-chocolate character of these roast malts, combined with a single hop addition at the start of the boil and a final alcohol content somewhere around 78% ABV will bring some needed balance to the bittersweet equation.

Lost In The Echo Oatmeal Stout Recipe

Geoff Colemans award-winning oatmeal stout delivers a complex mouthfeel with flavors of coffee, roasted malts, and a balanced sweetness over a medium smooth body.

Geoff ColemanMar 11, 2017 – 2 min read

Geoff Colemans award-winning oatmeal stout delivers a complex mouthfeel with flavors of coffee, roasted malts, and a balanced sweetness over a medium smooth body.

ALL-GRAIN

6.5 lb 2-row malt 1.5 lb flaked oats 12 oz biscuit malt 9 oz Caramel 60L 9 oz pale chocolate malt 9 oz Black Pearl malt 7 oz chocolate malt 3 oz roasted barley

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History Of Oatmeal Stout

Look at the beginnings of any modern stout and youll find the porter. Every stout, including Dry Irish, American, Imperial, and Oatmeal are rooted in the porter heritage.

As Ive talked about in other stout profiles, the first use of stout in reference to beer can be traced back to at least 1677, where it was used to describe a stronger version of the common dark beers of the time. These early dark beers really have no modern equivalent, though they would be most closely related to the English Brown Porter.

The beer of this time period was commonly made with barley malted and toasted in rudimentary ways. Different strength brews were mixed to arrive at a desired character. These final products invariably were of a brown color and had a variable smoky quality due to the malt processing. The more hearty, or stout, of these products would have likely retained the descriptor.

The word stout would become more exact as beer production advanced. It would continue to describe a beers strength through the early 1700s when a refining of the British brown ale took place to compete with the rising popularity of the new and fashionable paler ales. This evolved brown ale would rise in popularity to finally gain the name Porter, allegedly through it esteem with Londons dockyard working class. The popularity of porter radiated outward from Great Britain to Ireland, Russia, and even India.