Lebkuchen Stout

Sometimes I get a desire to brew something having had a commercial beer that I simply loved or enjoyed certain aspects of. Other times it's just through a desire to use a certain ingredient or brew a particular style. However, this beer was inspired by a tweet I read, posted by fellow beer geek and notorious London craft aficionado, Dina. I feel compelled to paste that tweet in its full glory, so here it is:

(blogger won't let me use twitter's embed code - gah!)

To save you googling if you've not come across the name, Lebkuchen is a traditional German delicacy, something akin to gingerbread but apparently with some regional variation in the recipe. It can contain honey, spices, nuts and other ingredients but ginger is always used. The origins of this traditional Christmas treat can be traced back to ancient times, which in my head seemed to align nicely with beer. I thought this was a great idea for a brew and started to piece together a recipe, based upon a sweet milk stout. After a bit of fiddling around and reading Lebkuchen recipes, I settled on the below:

Recipe is based on 24L pre-boil

The recipe aims to produce a sweet (but not overly so) milk stout, with lots of ginger flavour and aroma. The ginger was steeped for an additional 30 minutes before cooling the wort. The spices being added to secondary fermentation will be infused into the Amaretto with the intention of dosing the beer pre-bottling to achieve a subtle but noticeable flavour. Additional lactose may be used to sweeten the beer up before packaging but I'm hoping 250g will be enough to keep the FG up in the high teens or low twenties. The OG was 1.060, meaning the finished beer should be around 5-5.5% ABV.

So, Dina, I'll fucking make you one and thanks for the inspired idea!