Coffee in Breakfast Stout

Ok, I'm finally happy with my Irish red ale. Time to move on.

I want to make a milk stout with coffee and oatmeal and am mashing together some likely recipes. It's going to be partial extract. However, the coffee component has me a bit worried.

Some recipes have you steep ground coffee with the grains, resulting in a 60 min or more boil of the liquid. I've drunk coffee that was inadvertently boiled and it was not a happy experience.

Some recipes have you make strong coffee infusion and add it after the boil and cold crash. Since this isn't exactly sanitized, what about bacteria? I'm not all that worried, just trying to be careful.

I haven't seen anybody doing my next thought - what about if I put the ground coffee (bagged) in at the end, same time as the flavoring hops, boiled it for only a couple minutes, let the bag steep through the cold crash and removing it just before I pitch the yeast?

I made a chocolate / coffee last week. I ground the coffee, tossed the grounds in my hop sack at flame out. I plan to secondary with coffee and chocolate nibs however.
I would think you wouldn't want the coffee to 'boil' any greater than 5 minutes - just at the flame out there were tons of aromas

I would also advise a flame out addition.

I advise soaking the grounds in vodka in your fridge for a few days, then pouring it through a coffee filter into the secondary fermenter/primary after a few weeks or even the bottling bucket.

The vodka isnt an ideal sanitizer but it would definitely help. The cold brewing process keeps away the "boiled coffee nastiness".

I just brewed a breakfast stout and added coffee this way. Really any method would work decently well, I just wanted to let you know what I did to give you another option!

Add half a gallon of really strong coffee to the secondary. Take account of the added dilution in your initial recipe formulation.

I've been adding whole beans to Secondary on my Coffee Porter, & I really like the results. I do a 1/4lb of Espresso beans for about 5 days. It gives a strong coffee flavor that way, but you can decrease the time,style & amount to your liking of course. I don't worry about sanitizing the beans, I'm of the opinion that the Alcohol in the beer will take care of any critters. I haven't had any issues yet. The only issue with adding coffee to a beer is that the oils in the Coffee seem to really kill head retention. I've also heard of some folks slightly crushing or cracking the beans.

I've done coffee a few times by boiling it in the last 2 minutes. I grind 3.5 oz's (5gal) very finely so it fades into the brew and you won't notice the grinds at all. They use Sumatra in the Founders breakfast stout. I've done it that way but espresso is also very nice. It's very present and up front for the first few week into the bottle... but by week 5-6 the flavors seem to gel and it blends nicely. Good luck

Best way of adding coffee (I've found) is by taking two ounces or so of FRESHLY ROASTED beans - as in a week old at most - cracking them coarsely with a rolling pin, covering them with vodka for an hour, and tipping all that into your carboy when you rack to secondary. Coffee flavor will be pretty potent when you're bottling/kegging, but will mellow out nicely. The alcohol will extract the tasty coffee oils and aroma without bittering. (Dropping the beans into water that's above 200 degrees will extract all the bitter tannins from the beans, and isn't advised)

For the Founder's breakfast stout clone, I've added grounds at flameout and then added cold-pressed coffee into the secondary. The cold press is nice, very strong concentrated coffee flavor w/o any of the acid. If you searched on here there is a good description of cold-pressing

Flameout additions have always worked well for me. I've also done the cold-pressed addition in a Breakfast Stout clone but I did it at bottling and racked my beer on top of the cold pressed-coffee with the priming sugar. That also worked well. I didn't worry about contamination and apparently it definitely wasn't a problem, as I still have a half-dozen bottles of the Breakfast Stout that I bottled over a year ago and they are tasting REAL GOOD now!