Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Veggie Soup





Founders Breakfast Stout for Breakfast?

What other time are you suppose to drink a Breakfast Stout?



Breakfast Brewpub

I was sitting at L Woods Tap and Pine Lounge drinking a 5 Rabbits Beer Blonde Ale by 5 Rabbits Cerveseria, and I had the greatest idea in the world. An idea that will change the world, that will bring back something that people have been missing for hundreds of years. The breakfast beer.

If you ever go out for breakfast, your drink options generally are coffee or juice. Once in a awhile, especially at brunch, you will get to choose a mimosa or a Bloody Mary. I’m not sure about your, but those two drinks don’t really go with much. A mimosa might go with something nice and citrusy, but not very much more. A Bloody Mary will get you through your steak and eggs, but I’m not too big of a fan of steak and eggs. No, the only drink that is versatile enough to play with the vast menagerie that is breakfast, is beer.

You want something light, maybe a few slices of melon, maybe even a fish, how about a nice wheat beer, or blonde ale.

You want a Mexican Skillet, then how about an American IPA. Still want your steak and eggs, we got an american brown.

Oh, you want a stuffed waffle, with whipped cream and strawberries on top (and maple syrup). We got lots of options. I give you the english stout or maybe a traditional tart Lambic, or Flanders Oud Bruin – brewed with or without fruit.

The problem is that the number of establishments that will cater to this match made in heaven are few and far between. That leaves us with one option. To start our own Breakfast Brewpub.

The Verdict on Kuyken’s Coffee Stout

It’s been a few weeks since I bottled Kuyken’s Coffee stout and I still haven’t shared anything about it. I cannot let this oversight go on any longer. To be honest I haven’t said anything about it because the first couple of bottles seemed to have something off about them. It had a sharp taste that certainly didn’t go with the rest of the beer. It seemed like the beer   had been contaminated somewhere along the line, and some nasty bacteria provided its own flavoring before it died from alcohol poisoning. It wasn’t entirely undrinkable, but I couldn’t really get over that off-putting flavor. A few weeks have passed and I brought some bottles over to my parents for Easter last week. There was no sign of any off flavor at all. It was saved. I had another one a few days later and it was just as tasty. That’s the great thing about bottle conditioning, in that the beer usually improves with age (up to a point).


It mostly smells like coffee with some sweeter chocolaty notes.


It is very dark brown to black. It has an off white or light caramel head, with good head retention.


It is pretty sweet towards chocolate malt, with lots of smooth coffee flavor. It is less bitter than what you would usually expect from a stout. It has the sweatness hit you up front with the small amount of bitter on the back. The lack of bitterness was my brother’s main complain.


It has a heavy mouthfeel, but very smooth with a ligther amount of carbonation.

Overall Impression

It is a little sweater than you would expect from a stout, but this probably has to do with the addition of coffee cold extraction coffee. It would go great with a brownie or something fruitier like a Raspberry Tart.

Dark Lord Day

In the beginning there were monks.* These monks brewed beer for the greater glory of God. Then people brought their love of beer to America. They wanted to brew beer, so they did. But they turned away from their holy calling and started dedicating their brews to the dark lord. The culmination of their efforts is Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout. An unholy brew made by those dedicated to him. It is available on only on Dark Lord Day, and you must go to the headquarters of the group itself to get it: Three Floyd’s Brewery.

I am trying to find brave souls to join me on a quest to Munster, Indiana on April the 28th to search out and acquire the elusive Dark Lord Beer. What is reported to be one of the greatest beers in the world. More information about tickets to the event should be forthcoming in the upcoming weeks.

*Actually the Church is a relative late comer to the world of brewing. Before that it was generally the woman of the household or Alewive’s job to brew the beer. Selling extra beer was also a good way for a widower to make money at a time when there were few prospects for unmarried women

Bottling Kuyken’s Coffee Stout

This weekend Amy (one of the helper monkeys around here) and I bottled my third batch of homebrew. I guess I’m kind of working backwards since I’m starting with the bottling on the blog, but you’ll probably learn something, and in addition that means you could potentially taste the beer faster, since it should be fully carbonated in about 2 weeks.

I can’t remember when I decided that I should brew my own beer. I know it was during college since I started collecting empty beer bottles in college (only to throw them all away during a move). I also bought John Palmers book “How to Brew.” If you wanted to get into the craft, that would be the book to get. You could also get Charlie Papazians older book “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.”

So there I was several years after college at the Christmas of 2009 and I find myself with a shiny new homebrew kit. Unfortunately I’m largely at a field site for work and I won’t be permanently back home until June.

Lets get to the present times. I’ve got a few homebrews under my belt and a fancy new brew book “Radical Brewing” by Randy Mosher who seems to be a big fan of the so-called Belgium Reinheitsgebot “Experience, Creativity, and Knowledge,” as he always is pushing what you can do with a beer.

It’s time to step it up a notch, in that I’m not just brewing a pre-made brew kit, but I’m formulating a beer reciped based on radical recipes from the book.There is born, Kuyken’s Coffee Stout.

It starts with a solid American Style Stout recipe, and use some tasty Crystal Malts. Then, after primary fermentation you cold extract a few ounces of coffee and add it when you rack to secondary.

Ok, there was a lot of fancy spancy brewin’ terms in that last sentence. What the hell did I just say? I’ll go into more detail when I post about my next brew from the beginning, but here are some basics.

Crystal Malts: These are malts that are roasted in a rotating drum before kilning. They produce strong toffee-flavors. It will also add to the amount of residual sugars since some of the sugars from this malt are unfermentable.

Wort: This is basically the sugar solution you get from the malted barely and other ingredients, and contains the bitterness, flavor, and aroma of the hops. You then add yeast to this, which will ferment it, and you will get beer.

Primary Fermentation: After brewing your wort, you put it into some sort of fermentation vessel like a plastic bucket or carboy. Then you put in some beer yeast. After fermentation, you will sometimes siphon or “rack” the beer into another vessel that removes it from the yeast cake that developes. This is especially true if you want to mature the beer for a long time.

Cold extraction. To do this you take a bunch of coffee grounds and put it in a small amount of water for about a day in the fridge. Some people use cold extraction to make coffee which generally gives you a smoother less bitter coffee flavor than a brewed coffee. You can store this coffee for awhile and if you wanted to drink it you could mix it with hot water. The reason that this method is used for beer a lot of the time is so it doesn’t add any more bitterness.

To the Bottling!

The first think you need to do with clean and sanitize all of your equipment. I clean all my bottles as I used them, and then I generally put it into the dish washer which has a sani rinse feature, that will sanitize all the bottles.

Use what you got to make cleaning easier.

Then I clean everything else using a low suds oxygenated cleanser called Powders-Brewery-Wash. This is similar to Oxyclean Free. You could really use any unscented detergent, but the oxygenated cleaners barely needs to be rinsed and really are some of the best cleansers out there. Then you have to sanitize your equipment. You can use heat (like I use for the bottles), or you can use a chemical sanitizer. The most common one would be a beach solution, just remember that if you use a bleach solution you have to rinse it really good. I used a non-rinse sanitizer made by Star San, which won’t affect the head on your beer, but there are other brands out there.

A pain in the ass, but very necessary.

Sanitizing is very important for all your brewing activities. To make beer you generally want want one critter and one critter only, yeast. If you sanitize (kill 99.9% of critters), you will easily allow the yeast to kill off the remaining 0.1% of the critters. If you don’t, then other bacterias will start eating away at your beer and you’ll get all sorts of odd flavors. You won’t get sick, because the alcohol will eventually kill off most everything.

You then need to make a priming sugar solution. I completely forgot about this in the “excitement” of cleaning that I didn’t remember the priming sugar until after I started siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket and Amy asked when we put the priming sugar in. The answer of course is, before you start siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket so it mixes itself in good.  We quickly stopped the siphon and ran up to the kitchen to make it.

Keep as much air out as possible.

Priming solution is basically a simple syrup. You just want to add some sugar into the beer so the remaining yeast can ferment it in the bottle and create C02, hence naturally carbonating the beer. This simple sugar won’t add any flavor or body like the wort does.

So we make some and cool it off as quick as possible. Then pour it into the secondary fermenter with as little splashing as possible. After fermentation you want to aerate the wort as little as possible. Adding air to the beer will give you oxidized flavors, which tastes like cardboard. Generally if you have a beer for a long time, you will get these flavors eventually because the bottle cap can only keep out so much air, but by aerating the beer you’re going to get them a lot faster.

Yes that is an MGD box.

So now the beer is in the bottling bucket with a spiget. The tube and the bottle filler have been placed on it. Then I fill each bottle up to the top which after you take out the bottle filler out will give you the perfect amount of head room. You want to leave about an inch on top, which after carbonation will fill with C02 and protect your beer from air.

Amy Sumrall, bottle capper extraordinaire.

Then you take the bottle capper and cap each bottle. It takes a little bit of time, and you have to wait 2 weeks for it to carbonate, but then you will have tasty tasty beer. Yes there were a few snafus, but you’ve got to relax, don’t worry, and have a homebrew.

Bottled Beer!

Murphy’s Irish Stout

The last post was one of the lightest beers (at least in color). Now we go to one of the darkest. Murphy’s Irish Stout. The beer brewed from a blessed well in Cork, Ireland. Although the beer we get here in the States is brewed under contract in England.

Murphy's Irish Stout from the Widget Can

Most people first experience an Irish Stout by drinking Guinness. In fact, before the 80s it was probably one of the only decent beers you could find in this country. Murphy’s is in the same style of beer, and maybe has been less susceptible to the general decharacterization of beers that the whole world went through.

When I first came across dry stout (in the form of Guinness) we all convinced ourselves that this was such a heavy beer, kind of like a meal. Of course, compared to the Miller High Life that we had been drinking up until then, to us, it was the pound cake of beer. Of course now I know that Irish Stout is one of the smallest beers. It rarely has an ABV above 5%, and the final gravity, or level of residual sugars left after fermentation is very small. Hence why it is a Dry Stout, and not a sweet stout. This of course means the mouthfeel tends to be lower.

And like most Irish Stouts that we get in the US, the canned version has a nitrogen widget which simulates the nitrogen commonly used to pump Irish Stout from a keg. This is mostly the reason Irish Stouts have that Ice Cream creaminess.

Of course, this isn’t the same beer as Guinness. Murphy’s tends to be slightly sweeter and less assertive than Guinness or even Beamish. Guinness once had an advertising slogan “Guinness, the beer you’ve been training for”. Murphy’s advertising retort “Murphy’s Irish Stout – No Experience Required.”


A very roasty malt, with coffee and chocolate ice cream notes. There is no hint of hops at all. It kind of smells bitter, if bitter could be smelled. My guess is that it could be the acidity.


It is opaque and very dark brown or black. It has a creamy light brown head.


The first thing you notice is that it is very creamy, like  a milk shake. This of course comes from the nitrogen widget, and wouldn’t be noticeable in the bottled version of this beer. This gives me a perceived sweetness that I think comes from the creamy texture. It also helps that this is one of the sweeter dry stouts. It has a roasty toasty flavor and has some coffee notes. It also has a bitter flavor which comes from the highly roasted malts. It’s the same reason that dark French roast coffee is more bitter than lighter City Roast coffee. No noticeable hop flavors.


 Creamy light mouthfeel with light, almost unnoticeable carbonation.

Overall Impression

A great beer, that has a good roast flavor. It went perfect with the Italian Beef sandwiches. A dry stout like this is almost a required ingredient for a nice homemade beef stew. It has very similar and complimenting flavors to the other ingredients of the stew and will really round out the taste.