First Attempt at a Milk Stout - Substituting Milk for Lactose

When milk sits unrefrigerated for several weeks, it spoils. Imagine how awful that will be in your otherwise excellent stout.

I would order a pound (or whatever you kilogram equivalent is ;P) online. Don't feel like you need to wait on it to arrive to brew... it doesn't much matter if you add lactose sugar in the boil or later on as it will not ferment either way. Just make the stout like you did last time, but add some lactose dissolved in boiling water at bottling/kegging.

 

Great way to get people sick!

 

Curdled milk stout.

If anything I would imagine you could blend milk in with your stout when you pour the stout into your glass, but that does not really appeal to me either.

 

I use free range bison milk in my milk stout. Straight from the teet! Anything less is a compromise.

 

ignore everyone's advice and do it anyway

 

Cheese stout?

 

Yeah, don't do it. Malto Dextrin, extra dextrin malt, less attenuative yeast, or order the lactose on line and brew the beer now adding the sugar at bottling, all of these already suggested options are good ones. Warm milk will spoil.

 

Ooops. I just noticed the Op is posting from Nova Scotia and there are no bison there. Ever tried to milk a seal? Could be worth a try.

 

Aren't You the yogurt guy? Isn't yogurt just milk and lacto?

 

Goat milk all the way!

 

asserting absurd contrarian opinion is what separates us from the animals

 

Yup. And if he said sour milk stout, I'd say, sure, go for it.

 

You could try it with instant nonfat dry milk, added to the boil. Products range in the 50-55% lactose range. A milk stout of 6 gallons or so would use about 1 lb of lactose, so you might use two lbs. Unfortunately, there are proteins in milk that are foreign to beer. When lactic acid bacteria reduces the pH, some of these proteins change structure and coagulate to make a yogurt consistency. There likely is more biochemistry than just this. While you won't have lactic acid bacteria (assuming your sanitization is up to snuff), your fermentation will definitely lower pH and you may get some floating protienacious goo. Or the proteins may create some off flavors via some pathway I am not anticipating.

I suggest you scale down make a small batch, about 1 gallon, which I believe is 3.8 of your liters. Use the remainder of the extract to make a regular batch at 85% of the original volume. This way you should have something that you know you will enjoy and something that you know you will learn from. If you like the 1 gallon batch with milk in it (I'm dubious, but I usually hate beers that stray far from the path of purity laws), make a full-sized batch with it next time.

 

I think people talking about yogurt and spoiled milk are barking up the wrong tree. These things emerge from a bacterial fermentation. If OP has good sanitization, a good boil, and a clean fermentation, he ought to be fine, at least on that count. It's possible that because lactose is not fermented by yeast, something could grow on it, but this doesn't regularly happen in typical milk stouts that use lactose or other beers that leave behind unfermentables. With good sanitization and boiling, there is a low quantity of bacteria cells in the wort relative to the yeast. The yeast populations take off much faster, gobble up the readily fermentable stuff, and suppress bacterial growth by creating an alcoholic environment with a fairly low pH.

What concerns me is I don't know how the other 50% of the stuff that makes up soluble milk solids will impact beer.

 

Hence my suggestion to do a small trial.

Edit: I do think it is safe to say that if using milk to make milk stout was a great idea, people would never have bothered with refined lactose.

 

@pweis909 I'm not sure you're correct in your assement of the spoilage of milk. Ever left an unopened gallon jug of milk at roomtemp for two weeks? There are bacteria naturally present in the milk sufficient to spoil it in only a few hours at fermentation temps.

 

I've never had the experience you describe, where I have left milk unopened for two weeks, but I'm not sure what you think I got wrong. Yes, pasteurization does not kill all bacteria. Those bacteria can spoil the milk if they are allowed to grow unimpeded. Perhaps I am wrong in my description of milk spoilage as a fermentation? I am surmising that there is minimal oxygen, nitrate, sulfate, ferric ion, etc. to act as an alternative electron acceptor so I surmised that this is some sort of fermentation. I'll concede I am not an expert here, and while I am not really sure on that point, I stand by my point that I see no similar danger to using milk in beer.

Perhaps we have different assumptions about how milk would be used? My assumption - the milk will be boiled with wort, so the surviving cells of milk spoilage bacteria will not substantially augment the number of beer spoilage bacteria that survive the boil, and thus, will be in no condition to compete with the billions of cells of yeast that will be pitched. Similarly, when I make my own yogurt, I repasteurize the milk to knock back the existing level of bacteria so that when I inoculate with lactic bacteria, that bacteria has a vast head start to compete for the existing resource.