An Experiment with Oatmeal

With price of malt increasing, I've started supplementing my grain bills by adding quick oatmeal to my mash.  Prices at my local home brew shop have gone up 25% in the past year, and with the cost of shipping outside the 48 contiguous states, ordering online doesn't seem like a cheaper option (and I like supporting a local business.)

With my last brew (the Mosaic IPA that gave me all that trouble with marbles in the fermenter), I pushed the oats to a level I had not previously touched outside of oatmeal stouts.  This IPA was mellow on gravity, just 1.050, but I used oatmeal to make up ~10.5% of my grains.  It's important to mention that 1.002 of my gravity points were from table sugar.  To keep the oatmeal from becoming a flavor diluting filler adjunct, I toasted it in the oven for an hour at 300 degrees F.  Then I let the oatmeal sit for a week.  I read it can give a harsh flavor if it's added to beer immediately after toasting.  From previous experiments, I found that toasting the oatmeal like this gave me flavor contribution that tasted to me somewhat  like biscuit malt, but with much less intensity by weight than the biscuit malt.

I only bottled the IPA a couple of days ago, but it's already fairly clear.  I was a bit concerned that the extra protein from the oatmeal may give a haze to the beer, but it seems to not have been a problem.  The glass in the photo below has a lot of condensation, but I rubbed a streak of it away near the base of the glass.

As far as flavor, the beer has a nice malty flavor that doesn't seem diluted by the oatmeal at all.  Of course I did use Maris Otter as my base malt.

In the future, I'm planning to push my level of toasted oatmeal a little more, taking it up to 15% of my grain bill in an even lower gravity beer.