Working Title: Cosmic Chaos

Last week I told you how we received 9 oak barrels and filled 2 of them with The Big Smoke, just as a trial. Next week the real fun begins:

We're brewing a huge (huge!) imperial stout. this will ferment in the stainless steel tanks over Christmas and when we get back from the holidays I will rack it into the barrels to mature for a few months.
I'm expecting it to finish off at 12-13% abv which may make it the biggest stout ever brewed in the southern hemisphere? Prove me wrong please;-) I'm not making it that strong for people to get hammered quickly (trust me, no one will be able to binge this), I'm doing it to achieve maximum flavour. That being said, I could probably keep it at 10% and still have all the flavour, but since I've never worked with wooden barrels before, I think it is wise to give the beer as much defence against any microbes that may be living in the wood. Alcohol is, of course, poisonous to yeast and bacteria.

Recipe wise this is by far the most complicated beer I've ever made:

7 different malts from 5 different countries (NZ, UK, Germany, Belgium and Australia)
3 Different hops (NZ and USA)
Jaggery (a Delicious raw sugar from India)
Fair Trade coffee (grown in South East Asia and roasted by local Marlborough roasters, CPR)
2 different yeasts (Wyeast 1272 and 1968. And possibly a third if they can't finish the job)
And of course the big unknown, the barrels.

We have received all the ingredients, except for the Jaggery which has only just been released from MAF quarantine, hopefully it will be here by Wednesday.

To be honest the recipe looks quite chaotic but as we would say in Danish "there is reason behind the madness" and I'm confident it will all come together in harmony. Therefore the working title for this beer is "Cosmic Chaos". But if that name sticks around to the bottle, it would be a first. Usually we go through a few different names during the process before we settle on one for the labels. Another noteworthy fact is that this will be our 18th batch. We were always planning on doing something special for batch number 8, but this came around so fast and we had to brew an ordinary HopWired to satisfy demand. Back then we said to each other, "We'll do something special for batch 18 instead". I think it's safe to say that, if nothing else, this will be special!