Milk Chocolate Stout - secondary suggestions?

Hello all. So I have a Milk Chocolate Stout in my primary right now, and I'm thinking of tinkering with it when it's finished fermenting. SWMBO wants orange-chocolate, so I'm thinking of bottling 2.5 gallons of it with orange extract, and the other 2.5 with Jameson Irish Whiskey, aiming for that Irish Car Bomb Stout feel. Here's the recipe:

7lb Light LME
1lb Light DME

Steeped at 155 for 1 hour:
1lb Chocolate Malt
1/2lb Pale 2-row
1/2lb Crystal 60L
1/4lb Roasted Barley
1/4lb Black Patent
1/4lb Cara-Pils

Added at 45 minutes into boil:
1lb Lactose
1 cup Unsweetened Cocoa

Added at 50:
1tsp Yeast Nutrient & Irish Moss

Hops schedule: (I was aiming for a citrusy profile to help the orange half)
.5oz Amarillo/Centennial/Cascade at 60min
.5 oz all 3 again at 30min
results in 45.9 IBU

Yeast was White Labs #002( English Ale Yeast) from a 2-Liter starter on my BRAND NEW STIR PLATE.


While boiling, the wort smelled like intense coffee. It mellowed out and is black as night. If anyone made it this far into the post, what do you think?
I might throw some vanilla beans into the secondary. Has anyone ever used orange extract, and how was it?

[/question barrage]

-Matt

Sounds like some tasty combinations to me. The base recipe sounds solid, although for a sweet/milk/dessert stout I would have gone easier on the bitterness. You certainly could add some vanilla, it’s a perfect complement for the chocolate.

Try adding the liquor to taste in a sample and then scale up to the full batch.

I haven’t used orange extract, so I’m no help there.

Good luck, hope it turns out well.

Im looking to make a beer just like this. Im curious how did it turn out, and do you have any suggestions to improve it. Thanks

I did something similar (see Chocolate Cherry Popper Sweet Stout in my recipe drop down), but with cherry extract.

For a 6 gallon batch I used 4oz of chocolate extract and 4oz of cherry extract, both at kegging time. How I determined how much of each extract might seem a bit overkill at first, but I was hesitant just adding the extract to the whole batch and end up with too much/little, so here's what I did:

1. took about two pints out of the secondary and split it all into 10 glasses
2. separated 5 glasses to the left (the chocolate group) and 5 glasses to the right (the cherry group)
3. using a dropper I added 2 drops of chocolate extract to glass #1, 4 on #2, 6 on #3, 8 on #4 and 10 on #5
4. same thing with the cherry extract to the cherry group of samples
5. tasted each glass of the chocolate group and picked the best one
6. same thing with the cherry group
7. mixed equal amounts of best of each group into another glass and tasted that, just to make sure the mixture was spot on what we wanted
8. just for fun we played with different quantities of the remaining group 1 into glasses of group 2 but the mix tasted in 7 was definitely the winner
9. knowing the volume of each drop of extract, I calculated the amount of each extract needed for the entire 6 gallon batch and added them accordingly to the keg

We were actually a bit more anal than that and ate a salt water cracker between each taste

there is a pretty good irish car bomb stout recipe on here in the recipes section, lots of critiques and reviews.