How to Brew a Chocolate Coffee Stout! | Grain to Glass

all right welcome back everybody today we are going to be making a chocolate coffee stout so I've made seven decently long time last one was the bourbon stamp that I made that was pretty good but I think that base stout could have kind of been improved on a little bit so our base recipe this time is going to be more of the American stout style that's slightly happier much rosier than the oatmeal stout base that I made for the Bourbon staff that I made last year so this type of beer already has a pretty strong roasted chocolate and coffee kind of character to it but we're gonna amp that up with actually putting in real coffee and cacao nibs into the secondary fermentation to give it that really strong chocolate coffee flavor so hopefully this ends up being a moderately strong beer with a relatively full body and really strong coffee chocolate notes but not too strong but basically yeah it's gonna be a pretty fun brew day I think this is my recipe for five and a half gallons into the fermenter we're looking at 14 pounds of British pale Touro malt one pound of karapa three one pound of crystal sixty one pound of chocolate malt and half a pound of black barley so that should give us a hopefully a pre boil og of about one point zero five seven a actual og of one point zero seven eight as far as sounds go I'm using one and a half ounces of Northern Brewer at 60 minutes so just a simple video edition there's no further hop additions after that the northern ruler house that I got for my local homebrew store our nine 90 percent alpha acid so that gives us an estimated I'm you about 44 which is yeah it's kind of high but it's an American Stout and it should just purely be bitterness and no other sort of flavors so here with that single bittering addition so hopefully that works out well sort of mash is a 154 degrees for 60 minutes and basically that's a little bit on the higher end of the temperature spectrum for mashing the effect of that is to create a beer that has a little bit more mouthfeel to it so hopefully we end up with a little bit higher of a final gravity shooting for around one point zero to two one four thirds of one something like that now I usually match for 90 minutes but in this case we'll use 60 minutes and that's because I'm pretty sure it still get pretty good conversion during that period of time but I also don't want to end up leaving those roasted malts in the mash for too long just because sometimes that can kind of over to the roast beef and sometimes accurate character of this waltz and I want to be able to keep my mash pH on control because with the high percentage of roasted malts that BGH is going to drop quite a bit and the beer could become pretty acidic so I've got some baking soda on standby in case that actually happens and speaking of pH and water and stuff this is going to be the first multi beer a lot of 5water profile for though instead of having a higher ratio of sulfate to chloride it's going to flip the other way around or gonna have a higher ratio of fluoride to sulfate and so our totals in parts per million are going to be 52 parts per million in calcium eight parts per million of magnesium 65 parts per million of sodium 72 parts per million of sulfate 115 parts per million of fluoride and 55 per million of carbonate so in order to achieve that profile these are the additions we're making three grams of gypsum one gram of episode one gram of calcium chloride and one gram of calcium carbonate so hopefully that gets to same good balanced profile that has a little bit more multi character to it and doesn't end up being too acidic so we'll find out if they got a pH sample if it went to the mashing force and as far as East Coast we're using two packets of the nagas ham a least I probably could get away with one but adding two is just a good security measure to make sure that that fermentation goes the way I wanted to because last thing I want this beer is some sort of yeast created fruity esters from a slight amount of underpinning it's going to be relatively high gravity so hopefully it works out so right now we're heating up my strike water I already took a Kansan tablet and added a portion of that to this so that I could remove the chlorine and chloramines from the water and this right here is my edition of brewing salts that I've dissolved in some water as well so we're just going to go ahead and add those in now and stir it all up [Music] okay so we hit our strike water temperature I was time to pull out the heat stick and put the grain in and wrap this whole thing out [Music] [Music] okay so here is our mash temperature it's 155 so off by one degree higher though higher is better considering that I'm gonna lose about a degree or two though over the course of this so I think we're good to go it'll wrap this all up [Music] now I'm gonna grab a quick sample for the pH should just be able to pull that right from the father yeah [Music] okay so I took the pH to trip here and just got an approximate idea what the pH looks like yeah I'd say right now it's between 5.0 and 5.5 which is about where we want to be hopefully it turns out good just good news that means I don't have to unwrap everything and add baking soda [Music] okay time for the moment of truth find out what the final mash temperature was see how we did have it corset it I'm sorry that's upside-down look at that one hundred and fifty four point four we need to lose a temperature at all that's a first for me and I definitely could beat that - keeping my stovetop burner on as low as it gets not so hot that it scorches anything but just enough to keep the heat escape from the bottom under control so that's really cool the fun part by fun I mean not fun at all [Music] alright so we just had our boil right now and I came very very close to having a boil over here this had one of the most aggressive hot breaks I think I've ever seen in India pipe here that I prove anyway since we've basically started a boil now we're going to add that 60-minute video Edition the only hop addition and that's an ounce and a half of Northern Brewer [Music] so our pre og sample is in and it's reading about one point zero five eight so hopefully you can see that which is right on target so our estimated pre-boil og was one point zero five seven so all things are looking up right now [Music] all right so our 60-minute boils just finished up right now so I'm going to go ahead and pull the original gravity sample right now oh my god that was stupid okay don't do that all right so the Bri look pretty well all things considered I even have a couple scary moments Arielle's to boil over but other than that everything is actually pretty solid and straightforward so there's couple things left to do it's gonna finish you're cooling down to work here and then I got to rehydrate the rest of my dry yeast and then it what's the word is actually like very cooled down to 60 or less that we're gonna pitch it and let it sit so fermentation for this is pretty simple odds it's going to be the standard ale temperature range 65 to 68 ish or just about two weeks lekker that the night hand used grips through fermentation really fast so maybe it'll be less than that but we'll see bottle light is once all of the fermentation is complete we're going to transfer to a secondary vessel a secondary preventer and in that vessel we're going to add 2 ounces of cold brewed coffee and 6 ounces of cacao nibs so that should give us that boosted coffee and chocolate flavor that really hopefully will complement the richness I hope some of this stout so if my gravity is just high enough I might actually be able to technically qualify this as an Imperial Stout so let the fermented beer sit on the cacao nibs and the coffee for Friday like 3 or 4 days and just want to be taking samples just to see on the flavors progressing I don't want to get too overboard so I'm pretty good at I'll pull it off the bank accounts and models hopefully disappear doesn't take too long to be ready but if it is in the higher percentage alcohol region with a roasted beer we could be looking at a month or two so I figured now it's probably as good a time as they need to talk about how to rehydrate dry yeast again it's just important to rehydrate the dried oh you know they usually say that you don't need to you can technically just sprinkle it on top of your work but there's a lot of evidence that they and suggest if you sprinkle your dry yeast right into the work you're going to actually kill off a good portion of the cells just simply because they're going to be shocked so what you want to do is rehydrate them over a certain period of time and then pitch that into your work and that actually generally results in a higher rate of Easter survival but basically for us to take some water free boil about a cup or a cup and a half of water and let it slowly cool over time down to about 110 to 90 degrees in that temperature range you were safe to put the yeast into that water so what you want to do now is take a sanitized packet of your yeast and some sanitized scissors we go ahead and dump that in now I got two packets so I'm gonna get skint [Music] and then you want to take a sanitized fork or spoon or something and just stir it up gently until it blends in [Music] now if you want you can add some sugar to this water when you boil it to give them a little bit more of a boost but they're going to be just fine basically what this is doing is just waking up the east so that they're ready to go so basically then we're going to cover that and wait until our Ward is the perfect temperature he'll go ahead and pitch I just finished cooling off our original gravity sample so I hope that comes into focus it's looking at about one point zero seven four so that's actually four points lower than our targets so if we lost a little bit of efficiency I think with the big beer that this was but that's okay four points in the grand scheme of things that's not that so hopefully this does pretty well all right so now the temperature in the word is down to 60 so it's time to go ahead and transfer all that over and we're gonna aerate it just by splashing it straight down into [Music] okay so our word has cooled down to the appropriate temperatures and now we're good to go to pitch this yeast [Music] two weeks okay so this fermentation didn't quite go the way I expected it would nothing bad happened I'll say that but basically what happened was I pitched the yeast and the fermentation happened extremely fast I'm talking high Crowson was only for about three days after that he just ripped right through fermentation pretty much entirely within about five days I took a gravity reading at the end of visible fermentation and saw that it was about one point zero three zero so I thought okay maybe it's a little more attenuation due so I ramped up the temperature to 72 degrees gradually kind of raising it up towards that higher temperature range to encourage more attenuation I was able to get down to a final gravity of about one point zero to eight knot not actually as low as I was hoping so that makes this more of a sweet stab yeah it's been over two weeks in the fermenter it's done fermenting I'm gonna go ahead and move this into the secondary stage where we go ahead and add our cacao nibs and some coffee that being said I think I might dial those visions back considering that the percentage ABV is a little bit lower than I expected but I mean all in all it tastes great it's definitely gonna be a great final product it's just not as high on alcohol as I was shooting for it but that's not really that big of a deal we're gonna go ahead and transfer this over into a secondary fermenter and then I'm going to add the cacao nibs into coffee okay so as you can see there's stuff in here now so I added one ounce of a 50/50 blend between hot fruit and cold brewed coffee reason for the blend is because I wanted the robustness of the hot brewed coffee and the smoothness of the cold brewed coffee so I thought combining them might work and then I added 4 ounces of cacao nibs now these numbers differ from what initially was in the recipe when we have this on brew day and the reason for that I dialed it back because basically we don't have as much alcohol in the final brew as I was previously expecting so because there's not as much alcohol there to mask flavors and cut down on any bitterness we added a little bit less of these ingredients since they're both relatively bitter so basically we're gonna let this sit here for three to four days in the cold and once it's good to go and the flavor is where I want it to be then we'll take it out and transfer over to the bottling bucket and bottle okay so I ended up leaving the cacao nibs and the coffee in the fermenter in cold storage for about maybe four or five days I think turned out to have a pretty good flavor this particularly needed about three weeks or so to actually fully mature and let those flavors round out because there's roasted malt in there it tends to need a little more time to round out and mellow that I'm sure that as this gets a little bit older it'll get a little bit better but it's definitely to a point now where I'm happy with it and unfortunately it's been a little while since I've been able to upload a big video to the channel so thankfully this is now ready and we're good to go so I ended up calling it hello darkness my old friend and it ended up being about 6.1 percent ABV and 44 IBUs so it's definitely not an Imperial Stout because of the higher finishing gravity it technically qualifies as a sweet step although the flavor is not necessarily something I would necessarily say is a sweet flavor but I'll get into that more of course in the tasting section this far is a simple nice tasty example of the staff that's not too strong it's a great go-to so anyway I'm going to go ahead and this now [Music] there if this glass is a bit smaller anyway it is a nice dark very black color metaphors with a medium brown kind of dark tan head seems to be pretty nice fine bubbles in there it's going away or relatively quickly though unfortunately doesn't have to grade of head retention but that's alright as far as it wrong I get a lot of nice blue need chocolate notes so that's the nice thing about the cacao nibs is it's not like a chocolate are it's just it's chocolate before it becomes actually chocolate so it has kind of a nutty woody sort of character to it don't protect any sort of alcohols on the nose so let's go ahead and take the first swing the body of the sphere is actually not as full as I would have expected given its higher finishing gravity it's definitely a medium to medium thin body yeah which is unfortunate I was kind of open to be a little bit more body with this but that's okay I think I was also anticipating more alcohol so that would have also contributed to a little bit more body more about feel but overall it's okay [Music] so as far as flavor goes the roastiness is definitely very slow not really in your face at all which is nice but the coffee and the chocolate do come through very strong however not necessarily in the ways that I was really hoping for the coffee comes through has a little bit harsh it's a little bitter unfortunately I didn't think this through before I actually just toss the coffee in but I just used whatever coffee was on hand and I realized that I probably should have actually specifically used dark roast like espresso roast coffee because that tends to have a lot more roastiness and fuller flavor and it looks like I have light roast coffee in available to me when I made this so the lighter roast flavor is generally a little bit more bitter a little more fruity nutty kind of coffee and it works fine and in this I just think it would have been better and worked much better with a roastiness and if I had used like an espresso blend as far as the chocolate goes though it's really great because it's like like I said it's a nutty kind of woody chocolate flavor so so definitely more of the if you've ever had very very dark chocolate like almost 100% dark chocolate you'll know the pleasant bitterness that's associated with that but you'll also know there's a little bit of nutty woody flavor in there and that's what I'm talking about and that's great because I don't necessarily want to be drinking a chocolate bar I think that it actually complements the roastiness quite well so in the future I think I'll probably end up using cacao nibs again to get the chocolate flavor and maybe a little extra chocolate malt but yeah a little extra chocolate malt a little extra cacao nibs and then I'm gonna use the dark roast coffee to make this a really more nice rounded out beer but overall I'm very happy with it it's definitely a good go-to beer like I said but it definitely needs a little bit of improvement I think but overall still fun to brew it's still a good time I definitely find something about working with chocolate and coffee at jokes so if you like this video please let me know by dropping a like or comment if you do decide to brew this beer let me know I hope it works out well for you so if you do you like watching me brew my beer and drink my beer and talk about my beer and all things beer please consider subscribing to the channel if you do click that notification bell icon down there because that lets you know every single time I upload a new video I like to try and upload a video at least every month and if I can I like to do it more frequently but sometimes we all know life gets in the way but anyway through my current subscribers thank you very much for sticking with me and let me know what you think about the stuff that I do and I always always appreciate anything you guys have to say so without further adieu I'm gonna go ahead and finish off this beer and catch you in the next one so Jeeves

Channel: TheApartmentBrewer

Views: 53,338

Keywords: craft, beer, home, brewing, home brewing, hops, hoppy, lager, ale, stout, dark beer, chocolate, coffee, cacao nibs, cocoa, BIAB, brew in a bag, all grain, how to brew, yeast, fermentation, apartment, brewer, grain, glass, grain to glass, dry hopping, dry hop, IBU, northern brewer, carafa, nottingham

Id: j2QhHXM9WEU

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019