i am rather new to home brewing and currently have the brewer's best RIS kit in the primary fermenter. I'm thinking about adding some cold extracted coffee to the secondary. any recommendations for what kind of coffee to use to maintain good head retention? Also, any thoughts on adding vanilla beans or cocoa to the secondary?
If you're adding already brewed coffee, I don't think it'll impact head retention too badly. What you worry about with head retention is oils and whatnot, brewed coffee is mostly water.
Coffee, vanilla, cocoa, those would all be good in a RIS. But I'd recommend with your first one adding nothing to it, then tasting it when it's ready and asking yourself, "What would go really well in this brew?"
I agree with you that starting off by making the basic recipe would probably be best... i was planning on aging this beer for a good while and was curious how the tastes would change over the coarse of a year or so, so i didn't want to have regrets about not adding something i would really like. In general, maybe in the future, should i be worried about adding too many ingredients (like coffee, vanilla, and cocoa) all to one beer? my goal would be to have that awesome flow of flavors that you taste in a lot of good beers but i'm concerned about all the flavors just getting mushed together. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself and just need to do more trial and error... I didn't know if there was some method for when to add flavors to a home brew if you want to taste them at a certain point when drinking the beer.
It's very easy to overwhelm the palate with too many distinct flavors, resulting in just a general muddy-ness. If you want the natural complexity of the beer to shine, don't add anything. If you want to emphasize a particular aspect of that flavor profile - say, coffee - then add some more coffee to make it more pronounced. But like in all things, balance is really important.
I'd do coffee, or vanilla and cocoa, but I don't think I'd do all three together - I think it's just too "busy." But that's my taste, not necessarily yours.
Russian Imperial Stout... what to add?
Linear Mode
