Late last year, the winter nights were drawing in, tastes were moving away from those light, hoppy, BBQ slammer pale ales. Dark beers enter the fray, winter brewing starts getting planned after 6 months away from brewing due to a nightmare-ish house purchase, then… from the timeless void of space… Beerhawk had a sale… shit.! Beer tokens were earned from homebrew equipment, extra tokens earned from writing reviews of the aforementioned equipment… lots of beer tokens in the account to be spent on… well, beer obviously.
Much perusal and sampling later, Founder’s KBS makes its way into the glass. A big, scary, 11%, bourbon barrel-aged, Imperial breakfast stout from probably my favourite brewery; Founder’s Brewing from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Wow. This beer is a revelation. If you have shied away from beers as big as this, then KBS is the beer to change your mind. Big, smooth chocolate and bitter coffee flavours, with those bourbon notes from the barrels and a boozy, but not burning finish. This stuff is amazing, how can I copy it?
Luckily, Google came up with loads of information on it and the American Homebrewers Association has a recipe that apparently comes from the brewer himself, a gentleman by the name of Jeremy Kosmicki, result… cheers Jez.!
As always with American Recipes, I never stick to them exactly. I round quantities up and down to get to the kind of quantities that I use. After all, who wants to get stuck with 27 grams of Black Malt left or 78 grams of Munich at the end of a brew? All daft quantities that you’d end up using, just to get rid of them. So, 458g becomes 500g, 28g becomes 30g and so on. I also swapped a few ingredients for ones I had in, or could easily get, or just preferred… so I swapped a portion of the roasted grains for some of the debittered/dehusked ones, as I don’t like them too burnt and acrid tasting. After much titting about, I came up with this:
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