Leathery tobacco notes in stout

I never got leather or Tabacoo notes from special b , Munich or aromatic malts, but I am also interested in finding out how these flavors are put in a beer.

Is Kate the great a barrel aged beer?

 

No. IIRC, Kate the Great was oaked by puling a portion of the beer and combining it with port soaked oak spirals in a separate keg, then recombining the beer.

 

Here is Mike Tonsmeire's write-up of a Kate the Great clone he brewed, and here are his tasting notes. He makes no mention of leather or tobacco.

To be honest, when I think leather, tobacco, and zero sweetness, I think Brettanomyces. Here is one of Tonsmeire's Courage imperial stout recipes, and here is another. There are lots of tasting notes for these, and several of them use the word "leather." (I'm not sure tobacco comes up.)

Note that he killed off the Brett at some point, or at least tried to. You might not want a big beer in bottles with living Brett over the long term, as it might just keep going and overcarbonate them (drying them out to nothing in the process). So this is a little bit of an involved recipe. But it sounds delicious, to me anyway.

 

"I am almost out of beer... this is madness!" - Bukowski

 

I’ve brewed that clone annually for 6 years now and it’s interesting to see in his write up that he thinks it could use more roast. It is a little thin by today’s stout standards. One tip I read is to mash around 148 for a drier finish but that would also make it seem thinner. Might have to try upping the roast this year. That said I’ve always been happy with it. Great stout recipe.

 

My 2018 old ale had some leather and stone fruit, which I attributed to secondary fermentation in the bottle with Brett c. Primary fermentation used a low attenuating English strain, Lallemand ESB, and secondary fermentation with Brett shaved off about 15 points. Roughly, from memory, this beer went from OG 1080 to 1025 when the esb yeast crapped out to 1010. I probably have some record of the grist stored in a spreadsheet but I lost some of the recipe details due to data storage mishap.

 

SAFETY ALERT!
Hey, I just reread what I typed and realize I made a critical typo that could lead to a safety issue. I did not do secondary fermentation in the bottle on this beer. I did it in a Better Bottle, i.e., a 5 gallon plastic (PET) carboy. Adding brett to a 1.025 beer at bottling sounds like a recipe for bottle bombs. When the gravity stabilized at 1.010, I bottled, using a conservative amount of priming sugar in case a simple sugar stimulate to brett to also break down some more complex carbohydrates.

 

Depending on the batch you get, you can get pipe tobacco notes from a hefty late addition of UK Fuggles in a dark wort, and age it a bit. Very counter-intuitive to how we think about late hop additions here in the US, but it definitely develops over time.

 

In my experience with stouts and imperial stouts, I get some leathery notes and pipe tobacco from extended aging - Like 1+ years in the bottle. Probably not the answer you’re looking for, but I brew an Old Rasputin clone that develops these flavors after some time in the bottle.

 

Now that you mention it, on at least two occasions,I have felt late additions of Challenger added something that reminded me of pipe tobacco.