Stout flavors

[Jloewe]

New brewer. However ambitious!! Just finished a kit from NB and it was super easy. Still fermenting so we’ll see how it comes out. Anyway my next batch, will be a stout! Not only that I’ll go strait to partial mash, probably copy cat some else’s grain bill, maybe sub something similar... just to make it “mine” and add some flavor.

originally I was going to do an oatmeal, chocolate milk, hazelnut. But after seeing the price of hazelnut extract I didn’t want to add a decent sized expense onto something I might end up trashing.

so my plan is to add lactose during the boil, and cocoa and spices at flameout. Wanted some extract that would be cheap and match. Any ideas?

 

[Rob2010SS]

I don't like extracts myself. They usually taste very cheap and chemical-like. However, I will say that the only extract I like is the brewers best chocolate extract. It's very natural tasting and not overly powerful. If you wanted to add more chocolate flavoring, you could go that route.

You had said that you were going to go with hazelnut. You could go the route of hazelnut extract... if you wanted to stick with that.

Are you going for any particular kind of flavors? Any particular theme? Vanilla is always a good one in stouts or even some cold brewed coffee. There are tons of options for a stout.

 

[Jloewe]

No “theme” per say but it’s really a Thanksgiving into Christmas brew. Something heavy, something to share. A tasty treat that will go out of style after the new year.

 

[Jloewe]

I was also considering throwing an extra pound of DME in there and hoping for an imperial. But that might be too much experimenting too early.

 

[Rob2010SS]

So I've only done cocoa in the boil once and honestly, it BARELY came through in the final product. In my opinion, you're better off going with either the chocolate extract mentioned above or go cocoa nibs. Cocoa nibs give a nice flavor, especially if you toast them.

Given you're admittedly newer, I don't know if you necessarily need to make it complicated. A good chocolate milk stout would be good. Sounds quite tasty to me.

If you're dead set on adding something else, cherry or vanilla would go good in that.

 

[Jloewe]

Now one of the reasons I’m a little more in the boil is I don’t want to re-rack into secondary. Can you do secondary chocolate without re-racking?

 

[Rob2010SS]

No, the only time you'd need a secondary is if you're doing long term aging. The numbers vary but if you were planning on leaving it sit for 3+ months, I'd recommend secondary to get it off of the yeast cake.

However, you won't need to let it sit that long so I'd just do it in primary.

**EDIT** The only other time I'd say secondary is if you were adding something that was difficult to get into the beer without splashing. I do peanut butter stouts with real peanut butter and there's no good way to get that in there without excessive splashing, so I secondary those.