Chocolate in Breakfast Stout

[Jbpiv]

I brewed a breakfast stout this weekend we are going to age in a bourbon barrel out of Pittsburgh. And we used a local coffee house for the coffee addition. While we were at, we put bakers chocolate in it but thought let's make it a bit more "Pennsylvania" (Pittsburgh barrel, local coffee in central Pa) and put in a a few Hershey kisses (just regular, not bakers...) spur of the moment. Well when I was cooling the beer, I popped the top on the brew pot, and noticed some oil like stuff on the top. Not thinking anything of it I just went with it... Now thinking about it, on second thought those Hershey kisses were probably a bad idea. It was only three but I'm wondering if that's enough to hurt this beer. Any thoughts?

 

[Clonefan94]

The oils in the chocolate are probably going to kill your head retention. I did a similar thing one time on a chocolate porter. It actually tasted great, but the oils in it, just killed the head almost immediately. It's the only time I used chocolate and cocoa in a beer and it needed a while to age out of some harshness that seemed to be there from the chocolate. Took almost 4 months, but came out really good.

I have read that Dutch process cocoa is a lot better to use for that cocoa flavor as the chemistry of it is better suited for beer.

 

[McKnuckle]

I brewed with Baker's chocolate and when the lipids formed on top of the wort, I skimmed them off (painstakingly) with a plastic strainer. The head on the resulting stout was excellent. But lesson learned for sure.