Brewing a Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout (Grain to Glass)

this is a Mexican hot chocolate stout it's a dark eight percent beer that finished up just in time for The Fall season in this video I'll show you how I brewed it discuss a few things I learned during the process and then give you a review of the final beer at the end let's Brew [Music] next Mexican hot chocolate is a chocolate-based drink typically made with cocoa vanilla and cinnamon and it can range from sweet to spicy I brewed this beer with some chili peppers and added a vodka based tincture with additional spices after fermentation I'll show you the tincture towards the end the base of this recipe is two row malt which accounts for about 74 of the grain bill I also have some flaked oats to give the beer a smooth silky texture as well as some body I have equal parts of Munich chocolate malt and carafat 2 which combines make up about 12 percent of the recipe these will give some toasted chocolaty notes to the beer and also some color to get that really dark Rose flavor an additional color I'm adding in just two percent of roasted barley lastly I'll be adding in one pound of lactose to the boil for additional body and also sweetness foreign [Music] the first main step of Brewing is the mash this is when hot water is mixed with the grain to extract all these sugars and other components out of the grain to create a sweet liquid called warts for this six gallon batch I'm starting with five and a quarter gallons of reverse osmosis water that I'll heat to 173 degrees which is about 15 degrees above my strike temperature once I transfer the water from the HLT to the mash 10 the whole system will cool down to a strike temperature of about 158 degrees I'll let the HLT finish heating up and go Mill my greens to get them crushed the mill did a pretty good job and left a lot of the husk intact these husks will help filter and clarify the wart when I later separate the liquid from the spent grain the HLT has finished heating to 173 degrees I'm turning on the pump to get this water over to the mash tent foreign the hot water has been recirculating through the system for a few minutes and has now stabilized at 158 degrees I'm not going to acidify my water because the dark roasted grains in this batch will help keep that Mash pH in a good range I am going to add a little bit of calcium chloride calcium sulfate and magnesium sulfate to adjust my water chemistry this is an optional step and will only make a small Improvement to the final beer but regardless if you adjust your water it is important to use good tasting chlorine free water we are ready to dough in I'm going to shut off my pump and the heater and begin mixing in my grains with the hot water [Music] the key here is to slowly and evenly mix the grain with the hot water so that we can avoid getting dough balls in here which are basically just clumps of green that prevent water from evenly penetrating the grain after adding in the grain the mash tun has cooled down to 150 degrees which is our match temperature for this beer I'm going to put on the lid and recirculate this at 150 degrees for the next 45 minutes it's been about 10 minutes I'm taking a sample of the wart to check the pH and when measuring the pH it's best to cool the sample down to room temperature I always use a little bowl of ice water to sit my sample cup in there for just about a minute or two to get that temperature down we are at 5.36 the match still has about 30 minutes to go so I'm going to heat up the sparge water in my HLT this is another five and a quarter gallons of Ro that I'm gonna heat to 170 degrees for the water step [Music] the 45 minute Mash is complete I'm now going to step the mash temperature up to 168 degrees for the ladder the mash ton is now at 168 degrees I'm going to start transferring the wart from the mash tun over to the boil Kettle and on my system I do this through the whirlpool Port I'm also going to open up the HLT to start sparging the sparge process I'm doing is called a fly sparge the intent is to keep the flow rates equal between the HLT and the boil kennel so basically I'm adding water at the same rate that I'm transferring to the boil Kettle it's important to go slow here so that you can get a good nice even rinse of the grain for a batch this size you should be shooting for about 40 to 60 Minutes at a minimum this will help ensure you get a good extraction and match efficiency now that we have seven gallons in the boil Kettle I'm turning on the boil heater so that I can start heating up the wart while the remaining volume is transferring we have eight and a half gallons in the kettle this is our full pre-boil volume I'm gonna stir this up really quick and then take a sample so I can measure the pre-boil gravity and this will tell us how well we extracted the grains I'm putting a few milliliters into the easy dins which is a tool used to measure the density of the warts this only takes a few seconds and it calculates the specific gravity using the brewmeister app we are at 1.061 a hot break is just starting to form so I'm going to add a few drops of anti-foaming agent so that this doesn't boil over I'll usually wait until the hot break is finished and then I'll add in my hops this is 35 grams of warrior hops which will add about 47 ibus to the beer there are 30 minutes left on the boil I'm now adding in the lactose for the final 10 minutes of the boil I'm adding in 2.6 grams of yeast nutrient this is optional and it's really just cheap insurance for an all-mought wart like this one the grain will provide all the yeast nutrients needed with the exception of zinc there are five minutes left on the boil I'm adding in my hop spider with the Paseo Chili Peppers [Music] a boil is finished so I'm turning off the heater and I'm going to start a five minute whirlpool [Music] it's been five minutes I'm gonna turn off the pump and let this rest for 10 minutes so that the troop and hop debris can form a nice cone in the center of the kettle I'm almost ready to knock out into the fermenter I'm connecting my groundwater to the plate Chiller which will be used to cool down the wart as it's transferred into the fermenter and I'll run the outbound of the groundwater into a bucket and I'll use this later on for some laundry [Music] this batch at 67 degrees but I'm going to cool it down to 65 degrees for the yeast pitch while the fermenter is cooling I'm going to oxygenate my wart through the carb Stone on my unit tank and I'll oxygenate for 90 seconds at a flow rate of 1 liter per minute I'm taking a small sample from the fermenter to measure the oxygen concentration and also the original gravity first I'll measure the gravity with the easy dins we are at a gravity of 1.086 next I'll measure the oxygen concentration a good goal here is about 10 to 15 PPM of oxygen the last step for today the yeast pitch after the boil process it's very important to keep everything sanitized to prevent bacterial infections I made a Yeast Starter for this batch about 24 hours ago and I'm going to pitch the full 1.5 liters directly into the fermenter foreign to 67 degrees and I'll keep it there for about a week until we hit a gravity of around 1.030 then I'm going to allow the tank to free rise to 70 degrees keep it there for two to three days until that diacetal rest is complete I'll leave a link in the description regarding the diastole rest process [Music] okay fermentation is over and I did a quick taste test I'm now going to make a tincture with some guajillo Chiles cacao nibs cinnamon and also vodka I'm going to add 28 grams of whole guajillo Chiles but after chopping and deseeding them we'll be at about 18 or 19 grams I'm also adding 85 grams of cacao nibs and 113 gram cinnamon stick lastly I'm going to submerge all this in some vodka I'm trying to use as little vodka as possible but it took about eight fluid ounces to get everything covered gonna close this up keep it at room temperature for about a week and then I'll add just the liquid portion to the fermenter [Music] it is time for the final taste test the beer has been caged carbonated and is now ready for review as you would expect it is almost completely black it's opaque I can't see anything through it has kind of a tan brownish head of foam at the top very chocolatey on the aroma get a little bit of cinnamon too but nothing from the peppers oh yeah those peppers are there there's a little bit of heat definitely taste the peppers followed by that chocolateiness the cinnamon is definitely perceptible but I think what I'm gonna do I added 13 grams to the tincture but I think I might increase that to maybe 20 maybe double it to like 26 but other than that I think I'll keep the base recipe the same I'm pretty happy with this beer I think the only thing that I might change is the cinnamon I think I might increase that just a little bit that is it for today's Brew Day thank you so much for hanging out for this Mexican hot chocolate style brooding that's a lot to say let me know in the comments if you have any questions and don't forget to subscribe cheers

Channel: Ryan Michael Carter TV

Views: 4,783

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Id: YcBOnzD3TX0

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022