Fresh Mint and Chocolate Stout-ideas and advice

Looking for ideas and advice. SWMBO's mint garden is going crazy. That has me thinking mint and chocolate go together. Can brew a stout and give it plenty of time to age with mint by the time colder weather gets here.

Anybody have experience using fresh mint in brew?

What are a couple of good stout recipes to add mint?

A quick look at NB website shows they have a chocoate milk stout that sounds interesting with mint.

Hoping to make this my experimental beer for winter and if it is good will use it as christmas gifts for neighbors.

Thanks.

From a chefs standpoint I can tell you this much about using mint.

As with most fresh herbs, mint can and will lose it's flavor when heat is applied. So I would consider adding it after fermentation is complete. Pretty much like dry hopping.

You could also use a neutral spirit like vodka to make a mint extract that could be added to the brew before bottling. To do this, just soak some mint in the vodka for a few weeks.

This would probably the best option as it would allow you to measure and taste before adding all of the extract to the beer, and get you the best level of mint flavor.

Before bottling pull some of the beer, separate it into a few different glasses, measure it, then add different amounts of the extract and see which you like best.

My .02

Cool deal growing mint for brewing! I have a couple of mint plants growing (I believe just regular mint and spearmint) in containers. One recommendation is to monitor their growth...I had mint in my back yard when growing up and it takes over nearly everything. I don't have experience brewing with it, but I'm planning on doing something similar to what you're planning as well. One of my considerations is that a sweet stout with lactose sugar might be a little to sweet for the mint flavor (just my preference) so I'm looking at mixing it with something a little more robust like a mint/coffee stout.

My recommendation for chocolate, is that there's a very fine line between too little and too much. Add too little and it doesn't really come through, but add too much and you're stuck with a lot of sludge in the cleanup and it's harder to clear.

I brewed a Mint Julep Stout last fall. I took a cream stout base and added bourbon, oak, and fresh mint during secondary but found I got ZERO mint flavor. I ended up making a mint extract, and that worked really well. Add it teaspoon by teaspoon until it reaches your preferred taste level at bottling. My stout turned out delicious!

2 years ago, i brewed a 5 gal chocolate peppermint stout using fresh mint leaves. For the chocolate, i used a can of hersheys cocoa powder. A lot of people say to add the mint to the fermentor but i used what a remember was about a 1/2 lb (my computer crashed and all my recipes from promash got lost) that i mashed up enough to break the skin of the mint and tossed it in the boil about 2 mins before it was done. The stout had a great minty chocolate taste that was not overpowering but definatly present. Id say, take your favorite stout recipe and toss them in at around flameout. Be sure to mash the leaves a little so you extract more. I also added the leaves to the fermentor.