#25 Chilli Chocolate Stout

At the moment it is going to be a vanilla stout (chocolate hints from the chocolate malts). I am tempted to put a very small amount of coffee into it, but I need to think about the amount of vanilla first as I want to be able to taste it and the coffee is a strong flavour.

I put no thought into the hops for this – my plan was to simply use my old supplies with no idea how much or what “condition” they will still be in in terms of flavour. It is a stout after all, not a black IPA. Now there was a bit more than I thought, and even though the oils remaining may not be high, I decided to split them out over multi additions to minimise the IBUs – the numbers I get will be different to the recipe.

Notes

This was the first brew in the converted keg. Damn that is heavy with water in it trying to lift it up onto the bench. Note to self might boil it at ground level next time. And I had a boil over which is very impressive considering the pot was only about 60% full.

The chilling was not as effective since I had to make the immersion chiller have a smaller diameter so therefore taller and sticks out above the liquid (will just have to make bigger brews!). Taste wise at the start of fermentation was good – lots of floating turb into the fermenter, my poor process.

So after an uneventful fermentation, on the 25th April I added in 5 vanilla beans (which were chopped up and soaked in vodka for a couple of days) along with some vanilla bean paste (vanilla extract with vanilla seeds & other stuff like sugar). I thought my last attempt at adding vanilla had an ok taste when I first tasted it but it disappeared quickly – so why not add more in, and I did not have another packed of beans and we had paste… done! Add to that half a cup (reasonably compacted) of “Henry Langdon” Chilli Cocoa (which is a blend of “pure cocoa, sugar, chilli powder and paprika oleoresin”). We have used this in cooking and the cocoa flavour is not high, but the chilli is reasonable. And in it goes. I am not sure what adding sugar at this point will do in terms of my ability to estimate the ABV – some will ferment, some will probably add to my FG and therefore make it look a lower ABV.

1st May – bottling time. The beer tastes nice at this point in time – a good chilli and chocolate flavour but I do think the after-taste is thin. I should not have used so much malts like the Pilsner malt I think. Anyway I add to boiled water 80g of corn sugar, 30g of the Chilli Cocoa, and 1 tsp of the vanilla paste. Man that mixture smelt wonderful! I was only meant to use a total of 94g of sugar for carbonation, and if I assume the other two were 100% sugar, I overshot that big time – at a guess it could be as high as 150g which takes it up to carbonation volume of 2.7 which is one of my highest ever, and this is a porter/stout.

Tasting Notes

8/5 – I tried the one bottle that had dregs from the bottling bucket – man it shot out of the bottle when I cracked the cap. I have never had that before and I opened this one early so I am not sure how worried I should be. The chilli was very intense, which is surprising.

1/7 – All the bottles were over carbed – 1040 in the bottle (what you could get out safely). So the chilli cocoa and vanilla paste clearly had a lot more sugar content in them than I expected. So while the beer tasted nice – with the chilli preventing you really drinking more than one a night, the over carbonation sucked big time. A safety issue opening them.