I cracked the first bottle of this yesterday evening.
The color was black, as would be expected. It only formed a small head, the whole thing maybe should have been a little more carbonated, but it was not flat. The cocoa aroma was certainly present, on top of your usual dark grain/kind of burnt/roasty aroma that come with RIS. The mouth feel was very nice, not a viscous sludge but it had some heft to it. The residual sweetness I was concerned about due to the high FG was not really a problem. The cocoa flavor is what lasted on the palate the most, it is what the beer ended on. The espresso/coffee flavors were certainly present, but were in no way overwhelming. In fact, if you had not told me that coffee had been added and had said that all of the coffee flavors were coming from the Roasted Barley, because there was a lot of it, I would not second guess you. But the flavors were there, and I suppose they peeked their way through in the aroma as well. The alcohol was not present at all, but at only 8% that is not a surprise.
This beer is still what I would think of as green, which is to say that it is done fermenting and everything, but I intended for it to bottle condition for a few months before drinking it, and it has been conditioning for less than one month. I expect the cocoa flavor to drop out some on the palate as it ages, or at least that is my hop, and possibly the dropping out of the cocoa will accentuate the coffee a little more.
It is hard to say what I would do different, considering it isn't "ready" yet, but I already know that I want to brew this again and instead of being scientific and changing one thing I am going to go ahead and change a LOT of things. First off I am going to brew it as an AG recipe (but if I was doing extract I would use pale DME) and I am going to throw a small amount of Crystal 120 and maybe a small amount of Crystal 40. The ABV really should be at least 9, so I would aim for that in my mash profile. In big stouts while I dont like a strong alcohol nose or flavor, per se, in my opinion the alcohol helps lift the beer a little, it helps bring some of the complex, buried flavors more to the surface, and it helps warm the stomach, which, for me, is important in a big stout like this. I might up the flaked barley, or switch to oats, to give more mouth feel and compensate for a lower mash temp. I think I would either leave the espresso the same or I might add a little bit more, I was really hoping for that flavor more upfront, and I might also add less cocoa in my secondary addition. However, those last two changes are difficult to quantify until I have tasted this in another month or two. So I will not brew it again until then at the earliest.
While I lament not using the raspberries, it was for the best, as this look like it will be a solid beer that is thoroughly enjoyable. It is certainly not a dessert beer, it can be drank all around, which was my goal... I had hoped to achieve that with raspberries, and decided against it. Maybe when I brew this again I will split off a gallon and make a dessert beer with the raspberries. We will see.
. I too did not see much of a head - the first I opened after about 2 weeks in the bottle... no head, but the sip revealed slight carbonation. Finding a second bottle opened just last week (now something like 5 weeks) garnered better results. I'm wondering if this has something to do with the alcohol level, leaving only traces of yeast left alive (final clock-in @ 11%)? Thoughts from others with heavy-brew experience? The rest will sit in the back of a closet until winter sets in (which isn't until at least February for SoAZ ;-)
