Maple Bacon Stout Brewing

I'm back!  I know it has been a rough month for the constant influx of viewers.  Unfortunately other priorities are supposed to come before beer (horrible, I know) and therefore have been suspiciously absent on the interwebs.  That being said, I am back to brewing!  Well... somewhat.

Over Thanksgiving I went home and was able to temporarily get back to brewing.  Since it was Thanksgiving and I haven't brewed in a while, I wanted to do something special.  BOOM!  Bacon.  What is more American than to brew a bacon beer at Thanksgiving time?  Nothing I say, nothing!  I thought about using smoked malt again but decided against that, and besides. I didn't want five gallons of bacon beer.  Instead, I remembered Rogue trying to make a maple bacon porter yet underwhelming most people when it was released as a maple bacon brown ale.  I decided to one up them and make a maple bacon stout.

The recipe I used was based off the recipe I did for the pumpkin sweet stout (please do not judge me) earlier, but with some tweeks:

10 lbs English Maris Otter
0.75 lb English Black Malt
0.75 lb Briess Caramel (80 L)
0.50 lb Fawcett Pale Chocolate
1 lb Lactose sugar

Yeast: Wyeast 1099 Whitbread Ale

Mash in: 152 degrees
Sparge: 175 degrees

Original gravity: 1.062
Final gravity: 1.022

Apparently all the time off from brewing made be a little lazy and forgetful.  I didn't have time to make a yeast starter and the yeast nutrient container in the smack pack wouldn't break upon smacking.  Sigh.  As well, I forgot to add the sugar to the boil and had to improvise adding it after.  That being said, upon moving to secondary it tasted dandy... for now.

12/30: Split the batch into two 3 gallon glass carboys and added 24-32 oz of maple syrup each.  Mosher's radical brewing stated that adding maple syrup to the secondary will give a bigger maple syrup smell.  I obediently listened.  Will be adding my bacon fat wash when bottling next week and will update with a post about the process.  The other half will just be a maple sweet stout.  Joy!  Happy new year!

1/4: Tried my first attempt at fat washing