Beer Forum

My girlfriend said that she would be willing to brew with me if we were to brew either a raspberry chocolate stout (similar to DuClaw's Naked Fish) or a mint chocolate stout. She wants the base chocolate stout beer to be really really chocolaty, something akin to Young's Double Chocolate Stout. This leads me to several questions. The first is, what base beer should I use, a sweet or a dry stout (and if anybody has a good recipe I would love to see it as well). The second question is more of a general question about brewing with chocolate. What do you guys use and in what ways?

Thanks.

milk chocolate is a hard one.. there is alot of suger in it so the yeast will eat most of it.. so you could add a hole shit load of milk chocolate bars to counter that or you could try something that i want to try and havn't got around to it. when i want chocolate in my beer i'll put %100 baking coco in. but that will make it bitter. so what you could try is this. use a less attenuating yeast so your left with enough suger to sweatin up the coco. and add some Lactose, that will help with the milk taste. just start with a good stout recipe. i'm gonna try this some day

6# LME
1# DME

1/2# crystal 30L
1/2# roasted
3/4# chocolate malt
1/4# black patent

8 or 12 oz baking coco ( cut into small peices.. 10min)
1 1/2# Lactose (10min)

2 oz amarilla (60 min)
1 oz fuggles (30 min)
1 oz cascade (dry)

WLP002 English Ale Yeast

if you try this tell me how it comes out
good luck

Yeah I would agree that a milk stout would be the best base. I would use something like the recipe above, or use Jamil's sweet stout recipe he gave in his show. I used that and it would work really well for a chocolate stout.
I know young's is a milk stout, and they add chocolate bars (to the mash?) at some point in the process, along with chocolate flavoring. I would use cocoa powder or really high cocoa dark chocolate (like 70% or more). Make sure to skim of the cocoa butter and fats when they get to the surface, my guess is that those could cause some problems later.
I would then add a little chocolate flavoring at bottling, along with the mint flavoring.
Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

Oh, and I forgot to mention that a low attenuating yeast will only give you more cloying sweetness - the kind you don't want. If you want a good amount of sweetness, use a crystal malt, and/or lactose.
If you are partial mashing, you can give the beer more body by having a higher mash temp (like 153-154*)

SO, how did it turn out? Inquiring minds would like to know.

why not combine jamils sweet stout and the chocolate from his black forest stout.

I kegged it up 2 days ago and will be checking the carbonation level later on tonight. Here is the recipe that I used:

For 5 gallons
3/4 # chocolate malt
1/2 # crystal 60
1/2 # roasted barley
1/4 # black patent
6.5 # Briess extra light DME
1/2 # corn sugar
1 # lactose
1.5 oz UK Kent Golding 5. AA @ 60 min
10 OZ Baking Cocoa
WLP 005 (with 2 liter starter)
OG- 1.064
Fg- 1.023

Girlfriend decided that she didn't want to add any raspberry or mint extract so it will stay as purely a chocolate stout. From the tastings that I had, it was pretty good. A little overly roasted, so next time I think I will remove the roasted barley and add 1/2# of black patent instead. There is also a graininess in the mouth feel that I am wondering if it is due to the high amount of cocoa powder, we'll see if that drops out with the cold though. If you want I can post later with some more detailed tasting notes.

I am really enjoying this beer. The graininess in the mouth feel went away after a couple of days in the kegerator. It is still a little overly roasty so I will definitely remove the roasted barley and cut back the chocolate to 8 oz. It seems that if I upped the IBU's and the gravity I would have one excellent Russian Imperial Stout as well so that will have to be investigated.