Experimental Chocolate Chip Cookie Stout
 

So I had this thought a couple days ago and I could not help but wonder if it were possible to make a stout taste like chocolate chip cookies. Here's what I came up with:

Type: Extract with specialty grains
Volume: 5 gallons
Target OG: 1.049
Target FG: 1.011
IBU: 20.8
SRM: 38.9
ABV: 4.8%

Specialty Grains:
1 lb Chocolate Malt
.5 lb Roasted Barley

Extracts:
5 lbs Light DME

Misc.:
.5 lb Molasses

Hops:
.5 oz Mt. Hood @ 60 minutes
.5 oz Mt. Hood @ 15 minutes

Yeast:
Wyeast American Ale 1056

Fermentation:
8 days in primary, rack onto 2 lbs melted chocolate chips and secondary for 7-10 days.

This is just a guess right now, but I am thinking about brewing it within the next couple weeks. Anybody have or suggestions or possibly any experience with this type of recipe? Thanks.

I would go with .5 roasted, .5 chocolate, and 12-16 ounces flaked oats. Add 5 ounces maltodextrine and 12 ounces lactose at the end of the boil. Add only 2 of your 5 lbs DME at the beginning of the boil, and the remaining three at the end, with the malto and lactose. Ditch the molasses and use 16-32 ounces of Belgian D2 syrup, added at the end of the boil with the other goodies.

American Ale is not what you want for this brew. One of my favorite strains for stouts of this nature is 1099 Whitbread. Roll with London Ale III if you want it to finish a bit drier.

Ditch the Mt. Hood and go with either Willamette, Fuggles, or Kent Goldings.

Keep it in the primary for 3-5 weeks.

The best way to get chocolate flavor in a beer is adding about an ounce per five gallons of unsweetened, dutched cocoa at bottling. Boil it with your priming sugar. Anything else will leave you with an ungodly mess.

A good way to make the chocolate flavor "pop," and also add to the baked-goods feel is to secondary with real vanilla beans. Use two. About two weeks before they're going to go in the secondary, chop them up and place in a small jar or vial. Add enough *quality* vodka to cover them. The 2 week vodka soak does two things: one, it sterilizes the beans and two, it begins to draw a lot of the vanilla flavor out of the pods.

Pour this mix, including the chopped beans, into the secondary, and rack on top. I use Nielsen-Massey beans for two reasons: they're the best, and they come in a nice glass vial that's perfect for the vodka soak. Any way you go, make sure the beans are Madagascar Bourbon...nothing else.

Secondary for about 7-14 days, depending upon your schedule.

Or, if you didn't want to completely change your recipe...

I think it looks fine. I would suggest the addition of lactose, and I always add lactose at bottling, but I guess that probably doesn't really matter though. I use 12-16oz in my sweet stouts and chocolate stout.

My chocolate stout, which I have brewed a couple times now, has a slightly chocolate cake flavor to it. I use pretty much the exact same grain bill as you, but I use Marris Otter malt instead of DME, and have a pound of crystal in there also. If you can find an extract made from Pale Ale malt instead of regualr 2-row, it will give you a slightly more bread like flavor. I use cocoa powder instead of chocolate chips, 1lb added at the end of the boil. This is also how Jamil Zainasheff suggests using chocolate, and letting it sit about three weeks will draw out all the chocolate flavor, then you can siphon off the chocolate sludge and not have it in your bottles. I also add 2/3oz of chocolate extract at bottling. You can find it at baking places, it's made for chocolate cookies and cakes.

I think the molasses may be an interesting touch, and may give a kind of Christmas cookie flavor to the brew. The hops won't really be noticeable, so it doesn't really matter what kind you use, as long as it isn't a really aromatic variety. Most any English or noble variety will work just fine, Mt. Hood a relative of Hallertau, which is noble. I also use the 1056/001 yeast, it gives a very clean profile and lets the bready malts and chocolate flavors come through.

I would suggest the use of bakers chocolate or cocoa powder instead of chocolate chips. Chips have a higher fat content which will kill your head retention.

sounds like a bad idea... the oil in the chocolate will completely destroy your head. Try replacing your chocolate chips with 4oz raw cocoa powder and 2oz chocolate extract.

Besides all of these other long posts that have great Ideas.

Yes. Cocoa Powder.
Yes. Lactose.
Yes. Vanilla, Brings out that baked flavor, and sweetens.

But what about adding some Biscuit Malt for that bread/baked flavor?

btw... this is a german's chocolate stout recipe I cooked up a few years ago... been doing well in competitions and its an easy drinker.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f68/german-chocolate-stout-27895/

I was grossed out by the title of the thread, and some would call it blasphemy.... but it sounds pretty good.

-For what its worth; I second the addition of lactose (a whole pound or so).
-The molasses makes total sense, choc chip cookies usually use brown sugar.
-Definitely need vanilla for a true cookie vibe, maybe a couple beans in the primary like someone said, or you could use a good vanilla extract like Watkins madagascar bourbon vanilla, and then you could delay that until bottling.
-I also would go with cocoa powder at bottling, and substituting a mellower english hop like fuggles or KG.

- Yes to the maltodextrine - but I'm not a lactose person, that's just personal though.
- YES to the molasses but don't use very much. 2 oz by weight will impart a mild brown sugar taste. 4oz or more will go from brown sugar back over to huge blackstrap molasses taste in my experience.
- Yes to vanilla, it makes a lot of sense.
- YES to cocoa powder, NO to melted choc chips. Same reason everyone else mentioned, oils, cleanup, bleccch. Cocoa powder will give you exactly what you're looking for.
- I personally wouldn't even do the 15 minute hop addition. Just a single bittering charge, and that's it.

You've got a good start. I've been thinking about cookie beers as well, both Choc Chip and Oatmeal Raisin, and just haven't started on them.

Pretty much the only thing concerning beer that I generally disagree over is how to properly add chocolate flavor to a brew. The following is how I learned to do it, the way that yeilds the best flavor, the least mess, and the least detrimental impact on head retention, etc etc. I don't put this here to trump any of the other methods mentioned, and I leave it to the OP to choose what he'd like to do for his brew.

Chocolate stouts have been a thing of mine for a long while. I've read nearly every article, report, write-up, and recipe for about every chocolate stout there is. In addition, I've talked to brewers at Austin Homebrew and Young's Brewery (the makers of Young's Double Chocolate). This is what I've learned:

Bar chocolate, chip chocolate, really any solid chocolate has no place in a beer. It adds minimal flavor, but maximum mess in the primary/secondary.

More or less the same goes for heavy additions of cocoa in the boil. This is why: when you add chocolate to a beer before it's actually beer (ie: before there's alcohol), it will fall out of suspension and end up on the bottom of your primary. Case in point: make a cup of hot cocoa and let it sit for two weeks. You end up with a layer of precipitated chocolate at the bottom, and sugar water.

The reason recipes calling for cocoa in the boil need to add so much of it to get any chocolate flavor at all is because, as mentioned, 95% of it falls out of suspension before it can be incorporated. There needs to be alcohol present to dissolve the cocoa and keep it in solution.

Your initial thought to add the chocolate to the secondary was a good idea. The chips, though, are not ideal, for reasons already mentioned. Your best bet is boiling the 1 oz cocoa with your priming sugar, and adding that at bottling. Just type cocoa into the Austin Homebrew page to see what I mean.

Unsweetened, dutched cocoa is the best for these purposes, as all of it dissolves into the beer. With bar or chip chocolate, you're going to be left with precipitates, and the flavor profile isn't what you're looking for.

Ultimately, you're going to get twenty different answers regarding how to do this brew. Since you are, in effect, the brewmaster, it'll be up to you to pick and choose the best ingredients and factoids to apply to your stout. Let us know what you decide on.

I am nowhere near being able to attempt this but would love to see how it turns out.