Brewed up another version of lcasanova's double chocolate stout

I want to get the recipe down before I forget what I did:
Grains:
About 12 oz Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Rolled Oats, roasted until I thought I would burn it
16 oz Dark Wild Rice, roasted same as above
8 oz Millet, roasted same as above
Rice and Millet crushed then steeped for 40min around 160*
Oats added to last 15min of boil

4 lbs Brown Rice Syrup (60 min)
1 lb Dark Candi Sugar (5 min)
1 lb Black Strap Molasses (60 min)
4 lbs Sorghum Syrup (60 min)
1lb Wild Flower Honey (5min)
124g Russian Caravan Tea (60min)
3 frozen, then thawed, then mashed bananas (60min)

.75 oz Magnum, pellet (60 min)
.25 oz Magnum, pellet (30 min)
.50 oz Fuggles, pellet (15 min)

1 tsp Irish Moss (10 min)
1 tsp Yeast Nutrient (10 min)
8 oz Maltodextrin (5 min)

Yeast: S-05 (couldn't get the S-04 called for in the original)

6 oz Cocoa Powder (secondary, 14 days)
2-3 Vanilla Beans, split, chopped (secondary, 14 days)

I roughly followed these direction to toast the grains: I roasted the oats for 1 hour at 350-F; the wild rice for 1 hour at 400-F, it has a chocolate color to it once roasted- no longer black and shiny; millet starting at 225 with a 25 degree increase every 30 minutes until it was the color I wanted.

OG 1.089. This is gonna be a big beer.

I didn't strain out anything. I left the oats, the tea, the hops, etc in as I poured this into my primary. About the only thing that didn't go in was the handful of oats and tea that didn't dump right into the primary with the wort.

I'm basically trying to take Lcasanova's original recipe sweeten it up a bit and change how the chocolate hits. This is why I added the honey, changed one of the hops, held off on adding the Candi sugar until later, and am cutting down the chocolate amount and changing when it gets added .

Well, this will be an interesting beer, and if you wanted sweet, I think you got it. You have 4 ingredients that will only introduce unfermentable sugars.

Your beer without those 4 ingredients would've probably finished around 1.020, with the millet, oats, rice, and mostly maltodextrin, you are looking at about 1.035. This is not out of bounds for beer, but it is definitely in the range of the sweetest beer styles. I would say it is a good thing you couldn't find S-04. This also puts your ABV at around 7%, which is decent considering the FG.

If you want the sweetest beer possible, then I think you have found it.

On a note, adding the chocolate to the primary or secondary was a good plan to gain some chocolate flavor without increasing the bitterness.

Thanks for the input.

The original to me was just too bitter. Some friends really loved it because it tasted like baker's chocolate. While I can appreciate that they have a taste for baker's chocolate it wasn't what I was going for. One friend is taking a bottle to a British friend because he complains about American beer all the time. His reaction might be interesting.

My wife thought the beer was good but that was mostly because she doesn't like anything currently on the market other than Bards and hasn't had gluten beer in about a year and a half. And to her Bards is okay. She grew up with her dad brewing so she's had a lot of good beer.

Her opinion of the original was that it was a little too bitter and lacked body but was one of the best GF beers I've made so far (other than the all rice based raspberry beer -- that thing gets rave reviews almost no matter who we give it to). I don't think I used the dextrin in the first batch (though I have used it in others and don't think it helps much). I tried two bananas in the double IPA recipe with dextrin too and it still seemed thin to us. So we'll see what 3 bananas does.

I'm looking forward to trying a bit of this one when I transfer it to the secondary here in a couple of weeks before I add the chocolate and vanilla.

Cool- I want to hear how it goes too!

Did you purposely make it with a high OG?

I think you will find that the Candi Syrup helps with the feeling of the beer a lot. I have found that to be my experience anyway, especially the darker stuff. I have not yet tried bananas.

Definitely let us know how this one comes out. Quite the wildcard.

Also, if maltodextrin isnt giving you what you want in terms of sweetness (it really doesnt add any, just body), try lactose. It is quite sweet and provides similar body.

Yes, I did shoot for a high OG. I like beer with kick. I wanted it to be a double chocolate oatmeal stout! The current color without the chocolate addition is about as dark as the original. I'm hoping with the chocolate it will get even darker.

My wife and I (well, she did back when she could have it) like sweeter stouts. The ones that have a bitter or licorice flavor, especially as they finish just taste nasty to me. If there's a bitter stout I like it will generally have bitterness from coffee. Like Terrapin's Depth Charge.

I make a lot of high octane stuff. I make 1 barley wine annually. I've yet to make one below 10%. I still have two big bottles (big like 3 glasses of beer big) of the one I made last November sitting around (I did a tasting just a couple of weeks ago with some friends and of 3 barley wines I had my friends liked mine best and I don't think they were just being polite). I've made a wheat wine that was nearly 8%. I've got a double IPA for me I made with the left over hops that I didn't use for dry hopping when I made the GF double IPA last time (I did add some other hops too, not just the left over dry hop additions) and it should turn out around 8% or so. My GF raspberry creation is generally 6% or more (the best one so far in terms of flavor was 7.2% IIRC too). It is kind of what I do, good, bad, or otherwise.

chilort said:

It is kind of what I do, good, bad, or otherwise.

Click to expand...

Remind me not to visit you in the heat of Georgia summer.

DKershner said:

Remind me not to visit you in the heat of Georgia summer.

Click to expand...

The GF raspberry beer is very nice in summer. But, yeah, I've yet to nail down what my wife calls "the lawnmower beer." There's so many good summer time beers already out that I just don't feel the need yet.

Okay, transferred this one to the secondary. I didn't measure the gravity yet. I just wait two weeks on nearly every beer before I transfer them.

The smell was really odd. It seemed off but I couldn't tell you how or why. My wife couldn't place the smell either. The flavor was also interesting but the parts I was tasting had too much tea leaf in it really say that I got a good sense for the flavor.

The color looked very dark in the carboy but in the transfer tube it was very yellow. It was certainly a darker yellow than a lot of GF stuff I've made. Now that it has the chocolate and vanilla in it it looks like chocolate milk.

Two more weeks and I'll make the update about bottling it.

Alright, we bottled this beer this weekend.

The smell is really off-putting. I have no idea what it is. I did too many different things in this beer to be able to nail it down to one thing (could be the tea, could be because I left the oats in the primary....).

The taste seemed okay thought, which is encouraging.

The FG was 1.028, so rather high but should mean an alcohol content of just over 8%, which is in the range I was shooting for.

In a couple of weeks I'll be able to let you all know how this one turned out. It seems like it will have nice body too.

I used powdered milk in a non-GF beer I made for me and that seemed to work well so maybe I'll try at instead of the dextrin in the next version of this beer.

We were hanging out with our neighbors last night (and had waaay to many adult beverages) and decided to try this new version out. It is a little early but I often do that.

The smell must have been my new rubber stopper because the beer smells nothing like what I was smelling out of the carboy. That's good to know.

The beer tastes very good and has a lot of body. I'll have to try some more here in a week or so when I haven't had quite so many other things to provide a better report.

It isn't nearly as bitter of a chocolate flavor as the last one. We were joking and calling it chocolate milk but it isn't quite like a milk chocolate either.

All in all, I'm very pleased with this one.

Okay, finally had this one again without having a bunch of other stuff first. It is pretty good. I think I may have sweetened it up too much. The body is good. Maybe using lactose next time would be a good option too because even though it has body it isn't quite right.

I need to figure out how to make a mixture of the first one and this second one. I think that would be about perfect for our tastes.

The head had already gone down a touch by the time I took this photo:


IMAG0087 by chilort, on Flickr

That beer has a really nice color. Looks delicious!

I've never been all that satisfied with this version of this beer. The taste was just off somehow. It wasn't what I thought I'd made and my wife didn't like it but couldn't tell me why.

I finally took a bottle over to the LHBS. He had one sip and said, "you got a wild yeast in this one; it's infected."

I'm disappointed but I'm happy to know that the issue was something that could be explained. I was a little worried about trying some of these techniques again. But now I know. And personally, I don't think infected beer tastes a thing like bandaids.