Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer Stille Nacht: Belgian Chocolate Stout

This is my Xmas 2011 giveaway beer. Drinking one now, so I feel compelled to post. This is good!

• 14 lbs Belgian Pale
• 1 lb Chocolate Malt
• 12 oz Roasted Barley
• 9 oz Belgian Debittered Black
• 7 oz Belgian Special B
• 22 oz Oats Flaked

• 2 oz Styrian Goldings (Pellets, 6.00 %AA) boiled 60 min.
• .5 oz Saaz (Pellets, 5.00 %AA) boiled 30 min.
• .5 oz Saaz (Pellets, 5.00 %AA) boiled 2 min.

• 7 oz Belgian Chocolate (Cote d'Or Bittersweet Chocolate, one 3.5 oz bar of 86% and one 3.5 oz bar of 70%) chopped and boiled 10 mins.
• 4 oz Cacao Nibs (bagged and added to secondary for 2 weeks)

• 1 vial White Labs WLP530 Abbey Ale (big starter)

The juju:


The mess... VIGOROUS primary!


The custom caps from BottleMark:


The finished product:

This looks good. Any tasting notes?

how big of a starter did u use? want to brew this next weekend

I was also thinking of doing a Belgian version of FBS. How did this turn out?

Been a while, but IIRC, not chocolatey enough. I'd do all the above and then touch it off with some chocolate extract before bottling/kegging. That would add some aroma at the very least. Also maybe some vanilla bean. Since I made this, I learned that a touch of vanilla can really round out chocolate flavors. the beer itself was solid. I still use the base recipe (FBS clone basically, except this subs in Belgian counterparts like Special B for the C120, etc.)

Size of a starter? Big. Or pitch 2 vials. Either way. I probably stepped it up twice if I had time, if that helps. Of course, maybe it was too big since the beer literally 'sploded all over (-:

Cheers!

Great tips - thanks for replying. I've been watching this thread a while hoping that it produced a good result and it seems like it's worth a shot.