Milk Stout

This past Sunday I decided to finish off the 3rd of three kits I bought from Northern Brewer back at the end of Spring. The last kit was for the APA and the extract was a bit old which I believe led to some off flavors and the beer coming out too dark. A good stout isn't as likely to be impacted by either of these problems as much so I still had some high hopes for this beer. The biggest problem I had was old yeast. This was the first smack pack I had that didn't blow up like a balloon. I decided to pitch some of my Muton's dry ale yeast, and opened up the smack pack to check the quality of the liquid yeas. It smelled fine if a little boozy, which leads me to believe it smacked a while back and created a small beer in the pack. I pitched that yeast anyway, because it didn't smell or look bad. I tried the overnight specialty grain mash and it looked, smelled and tasted great come morning. I choose to do something less than a full boil, holding back maybe a gallon and a half of the water to allow me to dump in some ice cold water to help in the cooling. At this time of year the immersion chiller with Valley tap water just can't get the temp down enough. This appeared to work fine. This may be one of the last extract brews I do for a while, as I am planning to move towards all-grain. I did get some really great sounding extract with partial mash recipes in the latest BYO magazine, that are made to be low hop requirements. They had a Rye recipe that I am thinking I need to try sometime soon.