As mentioned last time, I have had a cream stout, a chocolate stout and an espresso stout. But I have never had all three. In a few short weeks that will all change.
To make the Iced Mocha Stout work I wanted to make sure special attention was paid to the ingredients. I started with a dry irish stout kit from the local beer supply store.
To mocha-tize it, I examined the contents of an Iced Mocha. Ice. Chocolate. Milk. And of course, coffee.
The ice would be supplied from the outside.
The chocolate had some scientific challenges. We couldn’t just drop a chocolate bar into the boil. Chocolate has fat (I know, it turns out those rumors are true), and that does not play well with the yeast. I had tried Hershey’s special dark cocoa during conditioning on the last stout, but it added just a hint to the aroma and was lost in the other flavors.
So this time I decided on 2 Tbps that would be added towards the end of the boil. I’ve also been curious about using cacao nibs. So I decided to add 4 oz.
Neither chocolate is sweet, and I’m not trying to rot anyone’s teeth, but I did want to try to enhance the flavor a little bit. I was going to add ¼ tsp of vanilla extract, however after consulting with the resident pastry chef, I bumped it up to 1Tbps.
For the milk, you can’t just open a quart of Berkeley farms 2% and dump it in, but you can get lactose powder. So I got 4 oz of that for the milk component.
I would need to go all out for the coffee. But what to use? There are so many different varieties of coffee and so many ways to roast it to get so many flavors.
So I made a field trip to the Peet’s Coffee & Tea store in San Ramon, CA. I announced my intentions, and was enthusiastically directed to the barista, who himself was a one-time brewer. The challenge is that you don’t want a coffee that will lend a nutty, fruity, spicy, chocolatey or really any other flavor. The other ingredients will capture other flavors. This coffee should be a straight forward dark roast, and taste like….. well, coffee. The barista recommended either French or Italian roast, and I went for French. Whole bean, of course, so I can grind it right before use.
So I added twice the recommended daily allowance of fresh grinds for a pot of coffee and took 1 liter of the yield for the brew (about 32 oz).
Here’s how I put it all together: I added the lactose and cocoa powder to the last 5 minutes of the brew. I added the Peet’s French roast and the vanilla extract to the carboy, just prior to pitching the yeast.
Then when the brew had fermented for a week, I added my cacao nibs. I did a taste test just prior and so far the results are good. We’ll see what the nibs bring to the party.
This brew will go into the keg on Sunday, and I will give it a week or two to carbonate. I’ll post some pictures and the results of the taste test when it is ready to go.
