What’d You Do Last Weekend?
Best brunch item ever? Maybe, but why don't you try them yourself and decide?
Sour Cherry Stout
After making a really lovely hefeweizen earlier this year, we decided to make a sour cherry stout when sour cherries came into season. Cherry season – at least sour cherry season – is remarkably short in Seattle given how long the season is for bings and Rainiers. By the time I’d identified friends with cherries on their trees, the cherries were either on their way out, or birds and critters had already taken the best of the crop. We have a local farm that picks, pits, and freezes pie cherries for a few weeks a year, so I turned to their crops when I couldn’t get enough elsewhere.
We’d heard good things about this beer, and Todd said that the stouts he’d brewed in the past always turned out really nice. I headed north to the Cellar Homebrew for supplies, and the guy behind the counter said that it was one of the best homebrews anyone had brought him. I knew we were on the right track.
This recipe comes from Charlie Papazian’s New Complete Joy of Home Brewing. Our edition’s pretty old, so the expert at Cellar Homebrew updated it for me (which I show below). I had leftover hops when we were finished brewing this beer, so I made Hops Ice Cream just for an experiment
Sour Cherry Stout
6 lbs dark malt extract syrup
2 lbs plain dark dried malt extract
1 lb crystal malt
1/2 lb roasted barley
1/2 lb black patent malt
1 1/2 oz Northern Brewer hops (boiling) 13 HBU (365 MBU)
1/2 oz Willamette hops (finishing)
4 tsp gypsum
5 lbs sour cherries (if not pitted, do not crush pits)
1 – 2 packages ale yeast
Note: The older version of the book calls for 3/4 c corn sugar or 1 1/4 c dried malt extract for bottling, but the printouts I got from Cellar Homebrew do not show that ingredient. If that is needed, I’ll put it in my follow-up post when we start to bottle this brew!
- Sterilize everything.
- Add the crushed roasted barley, crystal and black patent malts to 1 1/2 gallons of cold water and bring to a boil
- When boiling starts, remove the spent grains and add the malt extracts, gypsum, and boiling hops.
- Boil for 60 minutes and stir frequently to prevent scorching.
- After 60 minutes, add the cherries.
- Turn off the heat and allow the mixture to steep for 15 minutes to pasteurize the cherries. Add the finishing hops in the final 2 minutes.
- Pour the hot contents into a primary fermenter with enough cold water to make nearly 5 gallons.
- Pitch the yeast when cool.
- After 4 – 5 days of primary fermentation, rack into a secondary fermenter.
- Ferment an additional 10 – 14 days, and then bottle when complete.
