Homebrew diary: Oatmeal stout

It wasn't a good day to try and brew, but with a trip coming up for Christmas, I had to get some beer in the fermenter today so I could get my winter beers brewed and drinkable before the first of spring. I used the Oatmeal Stout extract kit from Midwest Homebrewing Supplies.

Yesterday I activated my Wyeast pack and made a starter, as well as getting all the necessaries out of the basement. If I'm going to store my gear in the basement I need to start wrapping it in a trashbag, I'm washing everything twice because the dust is so heavy down there.

During Theo's morning nap I got everything staged -- water in pots, equipment in sanitizer. I started warming up water about a half hour before his long afternoon nap, knowing I wouldn't be done when he woke up, but far enough along that I could still feed him, bathe him, make dinner and not make any massive mistakes. Several hours later, I'm still trying to figure out if I succeeded.

The first speedbump was the specialty grains -- I use a technique for steeping the grains I picked up on the Midwest forums, where instead of teabagging the grains in the brewpot, I soak them in a small amount of water in a saucepan, strain them into the brewkettle, then dump them back in the saucepan to repeat the process.

I didn't consider that the grains, in this case, were mostly rolled oats -- and thus, when I lifted the lid on the saucepan after steeping a half-hour, I had OATMEAL, making the rinsing and straining process a much bigger PITA than usual, and leaving me way behind on getting the boil started.

Once I was boiling, all was well and normal; I had set several containers outside to collect the day's snow and sleet, making wort cooling a cinch. I poured the cooled wort into my carboy, topped it up with water to 5 gallons, and pulled a sample to check the starting gravity...which came out at 1.060, nearly .020 higher than the expectation on the recipe.

I checked my hydrometer on a cylinder of water -- right on the money, 1.000 corrected. No matter how I played with the hydrometer, I didn't get anything close to the recipe expectation. The only other times I've had this issue, it was not enough water...but I fixed that issue a couple batches ago, and I'm 99.994% sure I was right at 5 gallons.

I decided that chances are that despite my efforts the water I added wasn't completely mixed with the very thick wort from the boil. I gave the carboy some extra shakes, pitched my yeast, and put the carboy in the basement; now I just keep my fingers crossed...