GF Brewing to Style - Irish Stout

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GF Brewing to Style #2 - Posted to Zero Tolerance Facebook Group January 31, 2022

Photo credit: Stuart Cole

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine putting a lovely glass of stout to your lips and taking a sip. This is your imagination so you can make this stout taste and smell however you want it to. Is it sweet? Hoppy? Caffeinated? Does it pack an (alcoholic) punch? Does it taste like oatmeal cookies, donuts, maple syrup, bourbon, or peanut butter? If you said, something along the lines of “No, but it’s fairly roasty, not overly malty, a bit creamy and sessionable”, or simply “Feck off with yer pastry stout” – well then, congratulations this is your lucky week when we talk about Irish (aka “Dry” Irish) stout and it’s slightly bigger siblings, “Irish Extra Stout” and “Foreign Extra Stout”. (We’ll cover oatmeal, coffee, imperial and pastry stouts another day).

Stout is hardly a monolithic category. It has a fairly convoluted history and people keep taking it in new directions. You can spend days reading about the intertwined history of porter and stout, but skipping ahead a couple centuries, one summary might be: By the end of World War I, stout had eclipsed the popularity of porter, becoming a much lower gravity beer in the process. (Ironically stout was once just an adjective meaning strong). While both “dry” (more attenuated) and sweeter stouts were being brewed in England in the early 20th century, it was the Irish Guinness brewery (at least since the 1950s) that took on the mantle of the drier stout style. Today the association of dry stout with Ireland and Guinness is so strong that most people refer to the style as Irish (or “Dry” Irish) stout.

Related styles and alternatives

If there’s one broad category of beer that defies tidy classification, it’s stout and porter. What’s true of the various styles of stout in the early 21st century (and late 1900s) isn’t really applicable more than 100 years ago. The BJCP has decided to group a number of styles under an Irish beer category (#15, including red ale, Irish stout and Irish Extra stout style). Whether that grouping makes sense or not, you’ll find some related styles in the BJCP’s “Dark British Beer” category (including sweet, oatmeal, tropical and foreign extra stout styles) and the sometimes hoppier “American Porter and Stout” category.

(Don’t obsess about) the Numbers:

The current BJCP guidelines suggest the following parameters:[1]

  • Irish Stout: OG 1.036-1.044, FG 1.007-1.011, IBUs: 25-45, SRM: 25-40, ABV 3.8-5.0
  • Irish Extra Stout: OG 1.052-1.062, FG 1.010-1.014, IBUs: 35-50, SRM: 30-40, ABV 5.0-6.5
  • Foreign Extra Stout: OG 1.056-1.075, FG 1.010-1.018, IBUs: 50-70, SRM: 30-40, ABV 6.3-8.0

Key attributes:

Dark (deep ruby to jet black). Medium to high roast aroma and flavor without significant maltiness. Especially when served on a nitro gas blend and with a draught stout faucet, there is a rounded, creamy quality in contrast with what is a relatively light bodied beer. Irish stout: Lower ABV and medium high attenuation makes this style quite “sessionable”. The Extra and Foreign Extra versions can pack a little more punch, but typically retain the dry and sessionable qualities.

Commercial Examples:

With a couple of exceptions, commercial GF breweries don’t seem to have embraced the drier, lower strength end of the stout spectrum. (Question for the pros: when a GF customer is looking for a “stout”, what would you say their reference point is? Perhaps not Guinness?) There are a few beers that might fall into the BJCP’s Irish Extra or Foreign Extra stout categories – though more likely closer to the American Stout definition. (Not included here are the stouts with coffee, toasted oats, chili pepper, etc).

  • Burning Brothers - Dane’s Dry Stout (4.1% ABV, 40 IBUs)
  • Ground Breaker Brewing - Cantankerous Stout (4.9% ABV, IBUs?)
  • Bierly Brewing - Blackbird Stout (6.2% ABV, 30 IBUs)
  • TwøBays Brewing - No Doubt Stout (6.2% ABV, IBUs?)
  • Mutantis Brewing - Buckwheat Stout (6.5% ABV, 20 IBUs)
  • Holidaily Brewing - Riva Stout (6.5% ABV, 30 IBUs)
  • Ghostfish Brewing - Watchstander Stout (6.5% ABV, 30 IBUs)

GF Recipes Links:

Photo credit: Dan Lipetzky (Zero Tolerance Gluten Free Brewing Group)

Grain bill & fermentables:

“Common knowledge” about the most famous Irish stout is that it’s brewed mostly with pale (barley) malt, a bit of roasted (unmalted) barley and possibly flaked barley. Though dry stout brewers have been using mostly pale malts for a long time (versus the earlier brown malt base in porter’s early days), the roasted unmalted grain thing is relatively new (circa 1930). So don’t get too stuck on needing to recreate this approach in your gluten free version. With the advent of some newer dark roasted gluten free malts, you should be able to achieve the dark color without moving the roast element to extreme. Keeping the grain bill relatively simple – and away from less fermentable sugars … such as you might find in crystal / caramel malts – should help avoid a beer with a higher finishing gravity (towards the sweet stout style).

You could start with a single or combination base malt grain bill: e.g. biscuit 4L rice, pale millet, and/or some roasted buckwheat malt to get you in the OG target range. Then top up with a smaller percentage of a roast malt on the far end of the color spectrum (i.e. gas hog or pitch black rice, C240 or dark roast millet). A small amount of very dark candi syrup (i.e. D-240) could also work – and there are one or two historical precedents for this approach – but I find it lends a different character to the beer that’s less modern-day Guinness-like (assuming that’s your benchmark).

One suggestion on extracting maximum color from the roast grains is to mill this small portion of the grain bill much finer than your base malt grist. The relatively small amount should not create a stuck sparge situation. An Irish stout without much foam may disappoint. If you don’t have a draught system with a stout faucet, you can pull out some foam-positive tricks in the grain bill by adding something that is high protein and low lipid. Yes to buckwheat, quinoa, some unmalted millet or roasted lentils. (Oats on the other hand can be a source of fatty lipids and detrimental to foam).

There are of course lots of ways to go about a GF Irish stout. Jason from Mutantis had these suggestions: "I think Eckert's dark biscuit rice (18L) is possibly a key ingredient for this style. Not really for color, but to give the beer a bit of that savory "bite" that I think of with Guinness. A very (VERY) small addition of barbados molasses could also be useful to give a touch of metallic bite. Perhaps some flaked quinoa would be a good inclusion as well; I find quinoa lends a bit of dryness to every beer I've used it in.”

Extract option?:

Yes! Build your base with rice and/or sorghum syrup. Using a separate pre-boil steep, you can extract the color from finely crushed, roasted grains without having to worry about mashing (given the small amount needed, using a coffee grinder is a good way to ensure color extraction from the roast grain addition). As with the all-grain approach, adding some buckwheat, quinoa, or millet to your pre-boil steep can provide some additional mouthfeel and foam enhancing qualities. See Brad Smith's extract recipe above.

Water:

A couple different approaches to water treatment include:

  1. Go for a balanced water profile with relatively low mineral content. You could slightly increase the chloride over sulfate levels to increase maltiness, but keep the ratio fairly even.
  2. On water, Jason says “minerals are crucial to help balance the roasted astringency. I would go for high carbonates and relatively high sodium.”

Mashing and Enzymes:

This probably needs to be a standard disclaimer across all of the styles: Access to enzymes often depends on where you live. Irish stout is a more attenuated style within the stout genre; your mashing and enzyme technique should be aimed at that goal. Assuming you’re going the exogenous route, Ondea Pro and Ceremix Flex (using the higher end of the Ceremix Flex dosage recommendation) would be ideal, but an alpha amylase enzyme stable at high temps in combination with a maltogenic option (e.g. SEBAmyl L, Fungamyl) will probably give satisfactory results. Another option would be adding some glucoamylase to a portion of the mash at the end, but making sure to denature this with a high temp mash out.

Hops:

Traditional hops for this style are the lower alpha, earthier UK varieties, especially Fuggles and Goldings, or a North American offspring such as Willamette. A bitterness charge mid-way through the boil and another dose to the end (flavor/aroma) is all you really need here. Restrained dry hopping with one of those varieties might be less traditional, but could have foam positive benefits.

Yeast:

There’s a great podcast episode (linked below) on the history of the Guinness yeast lab, and the origins and qualities of yeast for Irish stouts. In spite of being POF+, Guinness yeast doesn’t demonstrate phenolic characteristics. It can be a low flocculator and more prone to produce diacetyl, but again those traits don’t generally feature in the draught version of the beer. What you really want is a strong fermenter and attenuator with limited ester production. Fermentis US-05 and K-97 (who cares if it’s a German top fermenting yeast?!) are good options, but English varieties could also work (with potentially lower attenuation and higher ester production).

Oxygenate, add yeast nutrient and ferment towards the lower side of the recommended range to reduce ester production. (A spunding valve at a warmer temperature would also work).

Packaging and serving:

This beer doesn’t need a lot of aging, but you want to give it time to ferment out, clean up any diacetyl, and let the yeast settle out. (A clear beer will amplify the dark color impression). After a foam-positive dry hopping, cold crash and clarifying agent addition (all optional), prep this beer for a modest 1 - 1.5 volumes of carbonation either with priming sugar, keg CO2, or if you have it, a beer gas blend of CO2 and nitrogen.

Photo credit: Brad Smith

Part of the modern day mystique of Guinness on draught is the cascading pour and long-lasting head. There’s also the paradoxical impression of creaminess in a dark-colored but light-bodied beer. Many of those qualities can be attributed to using nitrogen (in a CO2/nitrogen “beer gas” blend) combined with a stout faucet (or a widget in canned versions) that assemble escaping gas bubbles into a dense foam. Nitrogen gas is less soluble so it doesn't stay in solution long (“beer is a solution”). With less CO2 there’s also less carbonic acid “bite”, making beers dispensed on nitro (beer gas) a little more “rounded” (some cynics and nitro-naysayers might say “blander”). It’s like applying a blur filter to a photograph – it may take some of the rough edges off at the expense of some of the finer details.

“But I don’t have a separate nitro cylinder, high pressure gauge and stout faucet! Can I still make an Irish stout?” Of course you can. Guinness only began using nitrogen in their draft stouts in 1959 – it doesn’t go back centuries afterall. Just keep the carbonation relatively low and use ingredients that will benefit foam retention and a bit of viscosity (buckwheat, quinoa, lentils again being good examples). If you do have a keg setup (sans nitro) you can also look to a faucet with flow control that allows you to adjust restriction and the amount of foam generated (a creamer faucet or Czech side pull faucet being two examples).

Another piece of Guinness lore is that it has some very subtle acidity. That’s been the source of conjecture for a while, with some beer personalities totally rejecting the idea and Guinness themselves citing a trade secret (see the MBAA podcast). Whether or not the brewery blends older, more acidic beer into the new beer may remain a mystery. If you’re convinced this is part of the allure, a simple approach would be to adjust the pH of the wort before or after going into the fermenter with a small amount of lactic acid.

ZT FB Threads:

Gluten free brewing resources:

Conventional resources:

References

  1. ↑ [2021 BJCP style guide https://www.bjcp.org/bjcp-style-guidelines/]
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