Big beer, small batch

I've wanted to do a big (high alcohol) imperial stout for a while now, but I wanted to wait until I made the move from extract to all grain, which happened last month.

But now I face the issue that my current BIAB all grain setup really struggles to do a bigger grain bill than 14lbs or so. So how do I get to a beer which takes 20+lb of grain?

Well, the mead experiments from a few days ago gave me an idea. I'd do a micro batch of beer in a 3 gallon water bottle. The bottles make aeration a lot easier, and long term storage is much easier (very important given that this stout is going to need to bulk age for a few months. So I started with a recipe for a very heavy 5 gallon stout, scaled it back to a third across the board (ending with 1.666 gallons of beer or so), and swapped in some DME for grain so that if I ever want to scale this back up to a bigger volume I can make with my current setup then I at least have a fighting chance of doing that.


666 imperial stout

4lb 2 row pale malt
1 lb pale dry malt extract
1.5.5lb roasted barley
0.5lb special B
0.25lb German chocolate malt

1.5oz challenger 60 mins
0.75oz goldings 30 mins

US05 (1 packet) - hoping that this will get to 10 or 11%. US05 can go to 12%.

makes 1.666 gallons of beer - I think - going to start with 2.5 gallons which, after grain absorption and boiloff should get me around 1.666.