Chocolate Stout EXP

The plan: I have had this idea in mind to try a few chocolate stout variations. We grow 3 varieties of mint at our house, and I thought it might be interesting to try to make a chocolate mint stout. We have peppermint, spearmint, and applemint, and I saved (froze) about an ounce from each at the end of the season. I also wanted to try to make a chocolate chili stout... using a cayenne pepper to spice it up. I brew in 5 gallon batches, so I've been working on buying 5 - 1 gallon jugs to split the batch up. I have the needed equipment and so at the beginning of 2010, I thought I'd try it out.

Recipe:
I've been sampling chocolate stouts over the past 2 months to see which would be a good recipe to base this off of. I settled on Young's Double Chocolate Stout. If you haven't tried it, do yourself a favor and go grab some. While researching a clone recipe for this, I decided that this would be a good time to move to all grain brewing. I was fairly confident that I could do this, but what I was worried about was my mash tun. It has had a horrible heat loss problem, so I needed to figure something out with that first. I have another blog entry detailing this process.
Ok, on to the recipe:
OG- 1.053
FG- 1.013
IBU-28
SRM-35
7# Pale 2-row (UK)
11 oz Crystal 60
13 oz Choc malt
12 oz Lactose
8 oz Invert Sugar
4oz Cane sugar
6 oz Cocoa powder
.33 oz liquid chocolate extract
1.4 oz Fuggles (60 min)
1/4 oz Kent Goldings (15 min)
Wyeast 1318 London 3

SO, I made some changes to this, I substituted Malto Dextrin for the Lactose... which I regretted later. It's not a huge deal, but I think it would have added a sweeter mouthfeel to compliment the chocolate in the recipe. Oh well, I was looking at the price of the two instead of what they did ($1.99 for 8 oz MD, $4.99 for 1# of Lactose). I also could not find Invert or Cane sugar, so I used 1# clear candi sugar instead. I did locate the liquid chocolate extract at a health food grocery store, but I forgot to add it to secondary, so it was a waste.

1/3 BREW DAY: OK, first all grain in 7 years, so pretty much my first all grain. I worked on wrapping the mash tun with a water heater insulation... big mistake, but I made it work for this one. Heated 11 quarts of water to 170, dumped in mash tun, waited a minute or two, then doughed in. Temp reading = 153... perfect. Now I would pray that it stayed there. I waited about 45 minutes and took another reading... 145. Shit! I decided to use the decoction method and I drained about 2 quarts and heated it up to almost boiling. I added that back in, took a temp reading.. 149. Shit! Took another 2 quarts out, boiled, added, temp reading = 150. I did this one more time, and then left it alone for the remaining 10 minutes or so before mashout. I added 3.25 qts of 206F, stirred then drained immediately (another mistake). Took a sample, Brix=9/1.036... target was 1.051. Collected about 4 gallons, so I heated 2.5 gallons to 196F, added to grains, stirred and took temp - 180... way too high. Held for 10 minutes then drained, collected 6 gallons, added another 1/2 gallon water. So.. I was so excited about all of this, and the use of the cocoa, candi sugar, etc... that I accidentally dropped ALL of it in at the beginning of the boil. DOH! I was supposed to wait until 10 minutes left in the boil. Shit, oh well. Somehow with the candi sugar I was able to hit my target gravity after the boil, actually go over it. My target was 1.056, and I got 1.062.

1/15 RACK TO SECONDARY: Between the brew day & moving to secondary, I had the pleasure of traveling to the Dominican Republic for work. We got to tour a cacao plantation where they harvest cacao seeds, ferment them, roast them, and make cocoa powder. I was able to bring some cocoa balls back with me, which are nothing more than organic cocoa powder in a hard packed form. The first step was to break the 5 gallons apart into 5 one gallon jugs. After that, I'd add one cocoa balls, in powder form, to each jug. I wanted to have 1 gallon of plain chocolate stout to compare tastes to, 1 gallon with a single kung pao chili pepper de-seeded and cut up, and 1 gallon of each mint - peppermint, spearmint, and applemint.








1/29 BOTTLED: Time to bottle... I decided since I only had a gallon of each, I would bottle in as many 12 oz. bottles as I could. I walked away with 8 plain, 8 chili, and 2 each of the mints + 3 22 oz. bottles of the mints as well. And I think maybe 1 22oz bottle of each the plain & chili. So, I will TRY to wait a couple weeks, maybe even until Valentines day... but man I'm stoked to try these. I think the chili one is gonna rock.

2/13 - TASTING!!! I have been looking forward to this for sooooo long now. I dreamed up this idea back in November, 3 months later it has come to fruition. On this night, I popped open one of the chili stouts... definitely not ready yet, hardly any carbonation at all... but the taste was pretty good. The heat was perfect. Nailed it! Hope the bitterness of the chocolate mellows out a bit with age.

2/18 - TASTING: Tried one of the Choc Spearmint Stouts while Ash stopped over to watch the Olympic women's halfpipe comp. Great head poured, but disipated quickly, over the course of 10 minutes or so. The mint was definitely too strong, but not too bad. Definitely not great, and I think if I tried this again (IF), then I would use, at most, half as much as I used this time... maybe even less. Concentrate on the choc stout and just add a hint of the mint. The other two mints are probably gonna turn out awful since this was my pick of the litter, we'll see.

2/23 - TASTING: With the good show of carbonation on the mint stout, I thought I'd crack open one of the plain chocolate stouts tonight after dinner to see how it faired. Well... the head was great, the aroma was nice, the initial taste was nice... but wow, horrible aftertaste... yuck. Definitely disappointing. Maybe it'll mellow over time... but I just launched in to thinking about all the shit that I did wrong that could have made that bitter aftertaste, and I'm not talking about hops. I don't remember getting that aftertaste with the chili one, but I did catch a faint taste of it with the mint one. Seems like I tasted that in the Holiday Cheer too... but that was definitely the clementines, and was a different bitter. I'll give these a little more time, probably try the chili one again this weekend for Mardis Gras and see how it is.