First Stout Recipe! and updates.

So I brewed my first oatmeal stout from a recipe that I came up with all on my own. Wow... my family would sure be proud. Anyway, I decided that the first basic stout I brewed was not sufficient, although it was tasty. So I made my way down to the local Co-op to buy ingredients for an oatmeal stout that I could make changes to in the future. I am still striving to nail down one recipe that I can replicate at will before going wild with the experimentations.

Here is the recipe:

1/2# roasted barley
1/2# black patent malt
1/2# crystal malt (60L)
1/2# chocolate malt
1/2# rolled oats
4# Munton's dark DME
2# Munton's light DME
1 oz. East Kent Golding hops
1 oz. Willamette hops

**I'll post the specifications on the boil times and gravities when I have the notes handy**

I put this batch together on Feb. 22nd and am looking to let it primary for at least another week. Right now my pipeline of brewing is being held in check by a lack of bottles. I've commissioned some friends to help me out with the acquiring of empties. Right now we have between 100 and 150 12 oz. bottles in our possession and are in need of more. Most of the bottles we do have are filled with a fermented liquid of some kind and are in different stages of aging. This leads me to a whole new topic... my equipment wishlist.

A couple of weeks ago I received a brochure from www.homebrewery.com. Inside I found a plethora of things that I need/want to get the ball rolling even faster. First thing on my list was a wort chiller. Up to this point, my wort chiller has been a cold North Dakotan snow bank. Although effective, this is an excruciatingly long process and not the most effective. So I broke down and spent $55 bucks on a copper wort chiller that will cool down the sweet wort to yeast pitchable temperatures in around 12-15 mins rather than 30-40 mins.

Other items I am in desperate need of are: some sort of temperature control chamber (old mini fridge) so that I may keep lagers cold fermenting and ales fermenting at a more constant temperature. I also need another 5 or 6 gallon carboy to add to the brewing pipeline so I may have more than two batches fermenting at any one time. Individual 1 or 2 gallon fermentation units would also be a great addition so that I brew small experimental batches.

Well that's all I have to update on for now.

Hopefully I can post something more rapidly than what I have been doing.