Having little kids around can make it difficult to get to the local hombrew shop so I devised a plan to have my wife pick up ingredients for me while she runs errands. The first time I kept it simple and asked for some yeast, hops and an airlock and she succeeded. The second time I threw in a grain bill for my Export Stout and and a Witbier. When she arrived home I asked why she only had one small bag (remember these are 1 gallon batches) of grain, she said the other was to big to carry. This had me worried since it contained only slightly more than a pound of grain. When I went to the car there was a huge (five gallon batch size) bag of milled grain. I checked the receipt and found that she purchased 13 lbs of base malt instead of 13 oz for the Witbier. Since the goal for this year is to experiment I figured this was chance to brew some really big beers. The big sack of grain included: 13 lbs Two Row Malt 10 oz Flaked Wheat 7 oz White Wheat 1 oz Acidulated malt F
Back in around August '13 I began thinking of finding new ways to extract flavor from brewing ingredients. An interesting thought came to me and I was obsessed with finding a way to get the flavor from something without taking its color. Immediately the thought of a pale stout was bouncing excitedly in my skull. After some internet research about pale stouts it appeared that it wasn't a new thing but it seemed like nobody had done one using the same ingredients as a true dark stout. It looked as if everybody was using coffee as a substitute for the roasted grain. This led me to start looking for ways to clarify coffee. I figured if coffee could be clarified then grains could be too, especially since the process of steeping grains is similar to brewing coffee. This blog post from super barista James Hoffman about clarifying coffee using iced gelatin filtration made me believe that a pale roasted stout could happen. For my first attempt I used the recipe for the milk s