Imperial Dark Lager

A place to discuss and swap recipes.
Post Reply
Jason Garland
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2022 10:38 am

Imperial Dark Lager

Post by Jason Garland »

...Or...an Imperial Stout that I fermented over the yeast bed previously used to ferment lagers. Why not? It's yeast, isn't it?

Anyway, I'm looking for feedback on my recipe. I am writing this as an extract recipe because my time is at a premium these days and I don't have time for an 8-hour brew day. Also, I don't think my present system is large enough to handle an all-grain imperial stout. Further, since Eric stocks the cans of Briess CBW, that's what I'm planning to use as my fermentables.

Recipe is attached as an image. Feel free to comment on it.
Attachments
imperial dark lager.JPG
imperial dark lager.JPG (152.71 KiB) Viewed 433 times
User avatar
Jimmy Orkin
Posts: 110
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2022 3:58 pm
Location: Carrollton TX

Re: Imperial Dark Lager

Post by Jimmy Orkin »

I did not do much extract brewing so I am no expert. I always heard that you wanted to use a light LME and use the mini-mash grain for all the darker grain contributions. So I am questioning the LME Dark. Also note that the Munich LME is only 50% Munich, the rest being a base malt.

Let it rip. See how it goes.
Jimmy Orkin
2024 IT Guy
User avatar
James Smith
Posts: 78
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2022 10:37 am
Location: Plano

Re: Imperial Dark Lager

Post by James Smith »

First off, I'm definitely no expert on these high ABV dark beers. If you have an hour though, there is a video from Baskerville Marcus at Weathered Souls where he covers imperial stouts and the Black is Beautiful beer they created. It goes into good detail about formulating recipes for this type of beer. I learned a lot. Complexity is so important in these beers and it requires a broad range of malts and adjuncts to achieve this. For example, the Big Rig Imperial Stout took a lot from what I learned in that video. In addition to 66.5% 2-row as base malt, it had the following:
  • de-bittered black malt-6.5%
  • flaked oats-6.5%
  • chocolate malt-5.1%
  • C120-2.6%
  • C60-2.4%
  • carapils-1.8%
  • chocolate wheat-1.7%
  • coffee malt-1.7%
  • roasted barley-1.7%
  • black barley-.2%
  • maltodextrin-1.7%
  • invert sugar #3-1.5%

Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6Lod4rp2gI

Hope that helps.
Cheers!
Smitty
Jason Garland
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2022 10:38 am

Re: Imperial Dark Lager

Post by Jason Garland »

I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner! Once I'm ready to brew this beer, I'll have a large yeast bed built up; why not brew a Baltic Porter?! Recipes are plentiful and ingredients are readily available. A Baltic Porter is after all, a big porter brewed over lager yeast. Plus, I can use somebody else's recipe and take all the guess work out of it. :D
Post Reply