You may recall a few weeks back my Dry Stout brew session video.

This week, we get around to tasting this beer.

I admit that this one didn’t ferment out as dry as it should.  Not exactly sure why that is.  If I had to guess I’d say that its because I had a bit of a tough time controlling and holding my mash temp where I wanted it (152-154F). Brewing in the cold temps and using a direct fired mash tun sometimes becomes a challenge.  Adding too much or too little heat leads to drastic swings when the ambient temps are pretty low.  However, this brew doesn’t really taste as sweet as a 1.018 finish gravity would suggest.  That leads me to believe that the high finish is more of a mash profile thing than an incomplete fermentation, but I digress… How does it taste?

The best part of this beer was its smoothness. It’s tough to really qualify the results without a side by side of a non-top mashed copy but I have brewed many different stouts and the roast character here just tastes so smooth. Despite crushing the pound of roasted barley into a fine powder there are no notes of ash, no astringent bitterness, and no burnt malt character.

John described the roast character as more dark chocolate as anything else. The roast character plays pretty nicely into the biscuity and nuttiness of the Maris Otter base malt. The flaked barley is hard to discern with the stated mash issues. However, the body is pretty nice to go with a little stout like this.

In the end, I really think top mashing warrants more experimentation. I have a couple more stouts in the near future and I will definitely be doing more top mashing. I also plan to do some pH checking of the mash to see how top mashing really effects that aspect of the process.

In the meantime, I’ll be out in the garage drinking dry stout and watching winter finally start to break here in Massachusetts.

BREW ON!