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Brewing a Kitchen Sink Beer: Part 1

Chris Lee
Apr 21, 2016
4 min read

Every home brewer has found themselves at a point where you want to make beer but all you have access to are the ingredients left over from other batches. Often referred to as a "Kitchen Sink Brew," this is a beer that is created out of the sheer desperation to brew while being limited to what ingredients you have laying around in surplus. This can, at times, be an excellent exercise in recipe building and practical thinking on your feet. Besides, you never know, you may even end up with an awesome beer as a result.

Here's my recent Kitchen Sink Brew

MALT

For starters, let's talk about what I had laying around in my ingredients box. I had some Pale Malt, Wheat, Imperial (Munich), 120L Crystal, Chocolate, Black Patent and a small amount of Aromatic malt. I checked the receipt from when I bought these and most of it came from an order I placed nearly 3 months ago. Everything was milled except for the chocolate and black malt so freshness would be key in determining what malts are still usable and which are simply past their prime.

The best way to test malt is to do a taste test. If something is good it will retain that fresh crunch and potent flavour. Quite the opposite is true of malt that is past it's prime as it will display stale characteristics and will be more chewy than crunchy. Ever bit into a stale nacho? Yeah, kinda like that.

I keep my ingredients in a box that lives at the bottom of my cool and dry home brewing closet. I went through each bag of malt and performed the meticulous tasting ritual. Most of the pre-milled stuff still showed good crunch and flavour so it passed as usable material. Unfortunately, my 120L Crystal and the Aromatic malts both tasted stale and generally awful.

If I wanted to use as many malts as possible, the logical beer style would be something like a brown ale, porter or stout. I decided that a Stout recipe would best suit my needs and allow me to use a bit of everything while getting rid of the larger quantities of the odd remnants I have laying around.

What I ended up with is rather typical of what you would find in a Stout, with the exception of the Munich malt. My hope is that the Munich malt will provide a slight toastiness with a touch of added malty sweetness. In theory, this sounds like something that would work well in a Stout so it's worth giving it a try. Remember, the idea here is to get rid of as much of this stuff as I can in one shot.

Yeast

I had a few options for yeast kicking around in the dry yeast variety. Any yeast that I use I reseal and put the remainder in a tupperware container that lives in the back of my fridge. I find that using this method allows dry yeast to stay viable considerably longer then the manufacturer recommended 2 weeks. My choices were Safale Abbaye, Safale US-04, Safale WB-06, and Mangrove Jack M27. Each of these yeasts I've used in brewing at some point over the course of the last few months, so they should all prove viable. My sleeve of Mangrove Jack M27 was the oldest of the bunch and not really a personal favourite. It produced some wacky tanginess in a Belgian Ale I brewed that I wasn't really pleased about. Could have been my fault or it could have been the yeast. WB-06 didn't seem like the right fit for this particular beer. May be kinda cool to try in a Stout recipe at some point but I'm not feeling all that experimental at the moment. That leaves me with Safale Abbaye and Safale US-04. Both should make excellent choices in this scenario with the US-04 being the more logical to style. I proofed both of these yeasts in room temperature water with an added half teaspoon of yeast nutrient to help bring them back to life fast. Both showed some action within the first 30 minutes or so which allowed me to have a choice when the time came to pitch. By the time that the boil was over and the wort was cooled and transferred to the fermenter, the Abbaye appeared much frothier and aromatic; both good signs of healthy yeast. Safale Abbaye it is! My beer has suddenly become an Abbey Stout.

HOPS

This decision was basically made for me because the only hops I had left were Hallertauer Mittelfrüh. Luckily, these are pretty low Alpha Acid hops that can work seamlessly in just about any beer style . I decided on two pretty standard doses that allowed me to empty the remaining quantities I had left of these hops into a single brew. One bittering addition at 60 minutes and an aroma addition at 10 minutes. The total bittering added would be somewhere around 23 ibu's which is about right for a Stout if not a tad on the higher side. I think with a bit of aging any flowery aroma will smooth out and subside to allow that chocolate maltiness to shine through.

THE RECIPE

Here is the recipe for my Kitchen Sink Abbey Stout. I'll follow up this post with the tasting notes and full fermentation schedule in Part 2. For now, this sounds like a completely ridiculous beer that I'm hoping turns out amazing!

1 Gallon Batch

60 minute boil

1.2 lb Pale Malt

6oz Wheat Malt

6oz Munich Malt

4oz Chocolate Malt

2oz Black Patent Malt

.1oz Hallertauer Mittelfrüh @ 60 minutes

.5oz Hallertauer Mittelfrüh @ 10 minutes

Safale Abbaye Yeast

OG. 1.063

FG. 1.011