Our Chocolate Mead Experiment

Has anyone tried this with Swiss Miss or some other hot cocoa mix? I have a bunch around so I just wondered. Ingredients are: Sugar, Modified Whey, Corn Syrup, Cocoa (Processed With Alkali), Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Nonfat Dry Milk, less than 2% of Salt, Dipotassium Phosphate, Carrageenan, Artificial Flavor.

Compared to Nesquick ingredients: Sugar, Cocoa Processed With Alkali, Soy Lecithin, Carrageenan, Salt, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Spice. Vitamins and Minerals: Calcium Carbonate, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Zinc Oxide, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Copper Gluconate, Manganese Sulfate, Biotin.

How about one with Carnation chocolate malted milk mix? You get chocolate and malt extract. Would that be considered a chocolate braggot?

i just wonder how long before the fat in teh milk chocolate goes racid
because when it does it will be so so nasty, that why you normaly use coco powders and bakers coco , all the coco butter (fat) is removed so its a stable product that will not go bad.

From my experiences adding chocolate in the secondary, when you add chocolate in whatever form (powder, chips, liquid) most of it settles to the bottom and is racked off. Taste and color change, but without haze and it tends to clear pretty much naturally within a few months. Based on taste after 8 months so far, I have to assume that any milk/fat settles out with the solids.

It has been 10 months, so far no issues. We are planing another tasting around new years, we will post our findings.

When you say "6oz by weight" what are you referring to? Is it 6oz/gal?

We used 6oz of chocolate powder, weighed on a digital scale, in one gallon of mead

Hope that helps,

D

Perfect! Now to do some shopping .....

So then ... 15 lbs of honey, 5 tsp of acid blend, 5 tsp yeast nutrient and 30oz of Nesquick coco milk mix .... is that about right?

My cans of Chocolate mix were 16oz a piece so I added the contents of both
32 oz total in a five gallon batch

D

what was the question?

(to the OP)

brauhausjoe said:

It has been 10 months, so far no issues. We are planing another tasting around new years, we will post our findings.

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looking foreward to this.

The people I work with think that this has got to be really nasty. However, I think this thread is the reason why I'm going to start brewing. Experimentation is the way of life for me. Looking forward to the taste test around new years.

1Brotherbill said:

The people I work with think that this has got to be really nasty. However, I think this thread is the reason why I'm going to start brewing. Experimentation is the way of life for me. Looking forward to the taste test around new years.

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We look forward to providing it You are really going to enjoy brewing. If you have any questions, please come back and ask!

Just in case anyone has gluten allergies and is wondering ... I have just did some Googling and have found at least 3 separate sites that state clearly that Nesquick cocoa milk mix is indeed Gluten-Free.
Good news for people with celiac disease that may want to try this recipe ...

Androshen said:

Just in case anyone has gluten allergies and is wondering ... I have just did some Googling and have found at least 3 separate sites that state clearly that Nesquick cocoa milk mix is indeed Gluten-Free.
Good news for people with celiac disease that may want to try this recipe ...

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Outstanding! That is a nice extra bonus.

Well it's after New Year's. What you got for us for a taste test?

We tasted all of the "chocolates " as well as some of our other experiments.

For reference we did:

031 – 24oz Hershey Chocolate syrup

032 – 1, 6.8 oz Plain Hershey Chocolate Bar

033 – 2, 6.8 oz Special Dark Hershey Chocolate Bars

034 – 6oz by weight, Hershey dark coco powder

035 – 6oz by weight Nesquick coco milk mix

036 – 6oz by weight Hershey unsweetened coco powder

The results:

31 smell fantastic, cloudy amber color, has chocolate taste, biteer going down.

32 Color very clear, almost white wineish clear, Smell not chocolatey, Smells more buttery, taste is buttery, bitter hard to swallow

33 Color light amber clear, smell very sweet, taste is buttery, bitter hard to swallow like #32 above

34 dark amber clear, smell sweet and chocolate, taste is buttery, bitter hard to swallow like #32 and #33 above

35 Clear golden color, smell chocolate sweet, taste chocolatey and sweet, drinkable

36 Color cloudy medium amber, smell sweet, taste bitter
Comment included "Dump it NOW!" "Please throw it away"

At 15.3 ABV there were comments on all the meads about the "Alcohol" burn at tasting, I think we also added a touch to much Acid blend and caused some problems.

Number 35 is still the clear winner.

We have two more batches of this working, one with the original recipe minus some honey to give an ABV of 11-12%
the other with a varietal honey.

Both of these are about 6 months into processing

Doug

dinich said:

Number 35 is still the clear winner.

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Sweet! I just got 2 lbs of Nesquick at the store yesterday.

Other than #36, I'll bet that you have much better tasting concoctions for all with 11-12% ABV.

So far I've had very good results with adding chocolate shavings into the secondary of 12% semi-sweet mead.

I have two pressing questions about this recipe;

1. For the Nesquick (I can't remember if it was mentioned, I read through the post again but might have missed it) do you use powder or the chocolate syrup?

2. Has anyone ever tried adding strawberries to this, as was mentioned a couple pages before? If so, how did it come out? Valentine's Day coming up put me in the mood for something seductive, maybe get a brew going and have it ready, aged, and tasty by V-Day 2011 for me and the lady. Chocolate and strawberries sounds like a very good flavor, I wonder how it'd be in a mead. Sounds like something good for the romance to me, at least.

1. just regular powder, As a tip it will blend better in warmer water

2. We haven't added anything yet, but have discussed many options.
One was strawberrys, we also considered some kind of nut flavoring, or maybe orange.

If you do the strawberry keep us updated.

D

Yeah, I don't really care for beer, but there's a rather excellent sounding stout recipe for a Chocolate Orange flavor that makes me think I might brew up a batch sometime, here on HBT. Thanks for the tip with the regular powder and all. I fully intend to add some strawberries to a one gallon batch and will post with the results in a year or so when I have 'em.

corexcore said:

Yeah, I don't really care for beer, but there's a rather excellent sounding stout recipe for a Chocolate Orange flavor that makes me think I might brew up a batch sometime, here on HBT.

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I'm thinking perhaps a Joe's Ancient Orange Mead with the 6oz Nesquick from this thread = Chocolate Orange Mead???

Hmm. A brilliant sounding plan!

I'd like to know the results of that. Sounds good.

D

If I was gonna do that, I'd probably go a MAOM rather than JAOM. Joe's is a great recipe, but its unpredictable. I've made two gallons of it and tried 4 bottles of them (both batches made within a week of each other, bottled after 7.5ish weeks, they were pretty golldurn clear) and each of the 4 bottles has tasted wildly different from the others, varying degress of dryness and sweetness, one had bottle carbed. I'd rather have something with a known quantity and strength of yeast, so I could be a little bit more sure of what I was going to get.

I have an important question .... we have looked and looked for Nesquik cocoa milk mix but can only find Nesqik "chocolate flavored drink mix". Is this considered the same thing? Or am I just not looking in the right places?

Yes, that's the right stuff.

As an update:


We racked our chocolate mead over to a tr-imary last night.
It was off the hook, Very nice chocolate / liquorish smell and extremely good chocolate flavor

Will be bottling in 4 to 6 months and have anothwer update then

D

Sorry for resurrecting such an old thread, but how did it turn out in the long run?

I'm thinking of doing a 5gal batch of #35 and mixing half with a banana mead to give a chocolate and banana mead? Good/bad idea?

We've not tasted our original batch since New Years. We wanted to give it some time in bottle age and mellow out. Will probably be New years before we tap another bottle.

Based on your new years taster, what do you reckon a banana/chocolate (#35) would come out like?

I would think it would taste good.

dinich said:

035 – 6oz by weight Nesquick coco milk mix

35 Clear golden color, smell chocolate sweet, taste chocolatey and sweet, drinkable

Number 35 is still the clear winner.

Doug

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Doug this is a very interesting experiment you've run. I'm curious about the final gravity of each of the batches as I didn't see them posted (perhaps I missed them). I'm curious to know if the Nesquik batch has the highest gravity? I'm wondering if that is why it tastes best?

Was the Hershey's syrup the sweetened or unsweetened?

Nesquik powder is mostly sugar (13 g of sugar in a 16 g serving size) so most of the 6 ounces was sugar. That works out in a gallon to be about 36 grams per liter more sugar than is in the cocoa powder batches, which would be enough to raise the gravity about 0.014. Did you get a difference in the final gravity numbers?

Thanks for conducting a cool test.

Medsen

What happened to all the pictures??? Thats kinda disappointing.

And again, this thread is resurrected.

I'm probably going to try a 1 gallon batch of #35 soon. Any word on the chocolate and fruit combinations?

I like to see such an old thread brought up again. The OP made it 3 years ago now! I want to know if all the batches mellowed out to taste decent, or if they were tossed out, or? How was the newer bigger batch? Merry belated christmas and happy brewing.

i've got a batch of the nestle aging as we speak. it's on about month 7 right now. i'm going all the way to 12 months before i try it again. i tried it at 4 months, it was alright. we'll see what a year does to it.

so how did everything turn out?

More resurrecting. This thread is the best reference material I've found for chocolate mead..

Kicked off a 6 gallon batch of what amounts to #35 8/1/16. 15# clover honey, 35.5oz Nesquick (family size container). NO acid, NO nutrients. Red Star Premier Blanc dry yeast

8/1/15 - Original SG 1.095
8/12/16 - final SG 1.000, Racked off to carboy

It's dry.. very subtle chocolate flavor. Intend to leave in carboy for 1 year and decide if I'm going to backsweeten or add any acid then.