Difficulties of Dry Stouts

So I'm aiming to do an Irish dry stout. Something low ABV, sessionable, and very approachable. Nothing extreme and along the lines of a more flavorful Guinness. I've heard the style is very difficult to brew. Could someone please indicate why? I would be doing a stove top partial mash with extracts.

Thanks so much. I fairly new to brewing anything besides prehopped kits.

Difficult to brew? Where did you hear that? It's just the opposite IMO.

Do your partial mash with some pale malt, flaked barley, the dark roasted grains and other additions like chocolate malt, wheat malt, or crystal malt if you like. Combine with a base of light DME, boil with hops, chill, pitch yeast, ferment and enjoy.

Five Gallons US

2 lbs English 2-row Pale
.75 lbs Roasted Barley
.5 lbs Chocolate Malt;
1 lbs Barley Flaked
3 lbs Dry Light Extract
1.25 oz East Kent Goldings (Pellets, 5.00 %AA) boiled 60 min.
.75 oz East Kent Goldings (Pellets, 5.00 %AA) boiled 20 min. Yeast : White Labs WLP004 Irish Stout

Usually a Dry Stout is considered one of the easier styles to brew and very forgiving of any mistakes.

I just wanted some clarification. I'd heard somewhere that they were very difficult but couldn't seem to find any information supporting the claim. Thanks

As said above they're not too hard, what I see alot here is tons of people posting about how the kits get stuck at 1.030....

Just make sure you get a nice starter on the yeast going, I don't think you should have too many problems. Probably try to mash at the lower end of the temperature scale

Dry stouts are easy IMO
Sweet stouts are the ones that get touchy

I made Midwest Supplies Irish Stout kit http://www.midwestsupplies.com/irish-stout.html and think it's quite good. It's one I'm drinking now. Used White Labs WPL004 yeast.

I think what you may have heard is that dry stouts are easy to get in the "good" range, but tough to get into the "great" range. Cris Colby of BYO wrote an article with that theme. The article also had some good tips as well. I'd post a link, but I'm sure you and google can find it.

stvo said:

As said above they're not too hard, what I see alot here is tons of people posting about how the kits get stuck at 1.030....

Click to expand...

The only beer out of hundreds that pooped out early was a dry stout @ 1.026, couldn't get it lower I even used beano.

While researching for a dry stout, lots of AG brewers had problems with a stuck mash due to the roasted barley.

The one I have now has a sour plastic after taste, which I think is due to my top off water, which I keep in a lab grade nalgene bottle.