Imperial Stout

Man are you planning ahead!

A caveat here, I am not a fan of any of calagione's recipes, or most any of his stuff from dogfish, its almost always gimmicky

Couple big things about this recipe

1 - Do not use dark malt extract, use light DME
2 - Do not add all the DME to the boil from the start unless you are doing a full boil
3 - Too many malts for my tastes in the grain bill already, and its only a PM

Going off your preferences I would do the following....(Oh and Im assuming a PM is OK)

I would switch out the dark extract for light
Use Pale chocolate malt instead of the carafa II and Chocolate malt, and up the amount to say 1.5#
Keep the debittered black, and up it to 1/2#
Add some flaked barley along with barley malt to increase the thickness of the beer (PM 3# of malt and 1.5# flaked barley)
Get rid of 1-2# extract (to account for the partial mash of barley)

 

So the final recipe I would suggest would be as follows

3.0# 2row
1.5# Pale chocolate
0.5# Debittered black
8.0# Light DME
1.5# Flaked Barley
0.75# Sugar
0.5# 60L crystal

Hops are your choice
This gets you a beer with the following stats

1.108
34srm - Jet black

 

I'll be brewing the MoreBeer.com Imperial Stout extract kit this Saturday. I did research on extract based Impy Stout kits and found this one to be the best put together based on using Light LME and getting flavor and color from the specialty grains (my opinion).

12# Light LME
8oz Maltodextrin
1# Crystal 40L
8oz Black Roasted
6oz Black Patent
6oz Chocolate

2oz Magnum - 60 mins
2oz Cascade - 5 mins

Wyeast 1098 British Ale - 2L Starter, Stepped up with another 2L of wort. Getting the starter going tonight so I can ferment, fridge, decant, step up, ferment, fridge, decant and pitch on Saturday.

Going to keep it in primary for 3-4 weeks then transfer to secondary onto 2oz Medium Plus Toasted Oak Cubes that I have had soaking in Makers Mark since November 2011. I plan to have it sit on the bourbon soaked oak for 5 months and then bottle and have ready for winter (northern hemisphere) and Christmas.

I guess I have really thought ahead... ha-ha.

 

Light LME is more fermentable (DME even more so) and it will help to make your beer not have that "homebrew twang" with less residual sweetness left behind due to the extract. It's good practice to get your flavor and color from specialty grains added during steeping or partial mashing.

 

And besides, you want some good age on an imperial stout anyway.

 

Didnt know you were down south....

As for not using dark extract, you have no idea what they added to it, so the flavor profile is difficult to accurately predict, making steeping grains very difficult to suggest. Also, dark DME/LME tends to be fairly unfermentable leaving you a very high FG and a sweetish beer

 

Dark extract would be more user friendly if the malts used to darken it were listed. You can use black patent, carafa II, chocolate malt or roasted barley to get the same color, but the flavor profile will be very different with each of these malts. Since you have no idea what's in dark extract you might be adding a bunch of something that's already in there.
If you feel up to it all grain does give you 100% control over the ingredients you use and therefore the flavor of your beer. I think most people are put off by the time and equipment involved in all grain but it really is pretty simple.

 

Diving into All Grain brewing with a Big Impy Stout may not be the way to go. I'd just adjust your extract recipe to include Light Malt Extract in replacement of Dark (try www.Hopville.com to formulate your recipe). Just think the grain bill will be huge for a 1st time all grain brewer (if that is what you are).

 

It does if you click on their avatar.

Dark extracts are not recommended, for reasons already stated. But you can certainly build a stout from light extract and steeping grains.

 

Wow, just barely May....