Best Way To Add Chocolate To A Brew

[Airgead]

Folks

I am working up a recipe for a very simple oatmeal stout (oatmeal, pale malt and roast malt with some fuggles for bitterness). I was thinking about splitting the batch and turning some of it into a chocolate stout. Have any of you guys out there done a chocolate stout? What is the best way to add the chocolate? The way I see it, there are a couple of options -
- Add some cooking chocolate to the boil (what would the fats do to the beer?)
- Add some cocoa powder to the boil (better as there are less fats)
- 'dry hop' with cocoa in the secondary

I am tending towards the cocoa in the secondary as that way I can do one boil for the whole batch and just split it up when I rack into the secondary.

Any suggestions from the experts?

Cheers
Dave

 

[Wreck]

I added cooking chocolate (70% cocoa) to the boil in a porter last year. Ended up extracting more of the bitterness from the chocolate than anything else.

However, I've still got some bottles that are a year old now, and the bitterness has faded a fair bit, leaving a nice chocolate flavour.

Not sure if I'd do it the same again. I'm considering cocoa to secondary next time.

Wreck.

 

[rhett]

Hi Dave,

Fancy meeting you here! I started a choc stout last night. Started with a Country Brewer porter wet-pak. These are meant to be made up to 22L, but will make a stout if you make to 15 to 18 L. While this was boiling, I started boiling 150g bitter non-dairy cocoa with 50g dextrose. Threw this in to the porter at the end of the boil.

I made it to 18L in the fermenter. I fear it might be very bitter. Will let you know how it goes.

btw - pls send your new email address to my work email.

Cheers,
Rhett.

 

[voota]

I recently read an article in BYO, it covers everything about adding chocolate and is quite interesting.
Here is the link. I'm going to try the White chocolate pale ale one day.
http://byo.com/feature/333.html
Good luck

 

[Jovial_Monk]

I think 180g good quality Dutch cocoa boiled 15 min is the best way to get chocolate flavor that persists. I guess you could boil the cocoa in some water or some of the beer and add to secondary, maybe a bit less mess that way.

My batch of a couple years ago the choc flavor faded very suddenly--I had added one melted Club chocolate bar to the boil.

Jovial Monk

 

[Airgead]

I recently read an article in BYO, it covers everything about adding chocolate and is quite interesting.
Here is the link. I'm going to try the White chocolate pale ale one day.
http://byo.com/feature/333.html
Good luck

[post="59876"][/post]​

Voota

Excellent link. Thanks.

If I were doing a full batch of choc stout it looks like cocoa at the emd of the boil is the go. Since I'm splitting the batch and only doing part choc I'll make up a cocoa tea and add it to the fermenter.

Cheers
Dave