After responding, I tried what you were saying. I have changed my song a bit. Soaking the cacao nibs in alcohol makes you have better control of how chocolatey your final product is as well as adds a small boost in ABV, which never hurts. I made a Mexican Chocolate tincture out of cacao nibs, vanilla beans and Mexican cinnamon sticks and added different amounts into each of the split ten gal. batches. I like the fact that when you add a tincture right at bottling, you can adjust the amounts to taste instead of adding a bunch of nibs and waiting and pulling multiple samples out until you like it. That adds more chances for contamination and we all know that's not a good idea. The chocolate flavor seems more intense as well as the fact that the nibs don't get tossed out after each use. I took all the tincture out of my jar and put more vodka on it to see what happens. The second run wasn't as strong, but still has intense chocolate flavor. I've been throwing away flavor and that makes me mad. I would try to use something cheaper than Cointreau, maybe triple sec because the subtle nuances of the Cointreau would be lost. The other option that I can think of is to add cacao nibs and bitter orange peel to make your own flavorings because all the sugar in liquors may re-start fermentation, unless you factor that into your priming sugar amounts. I hope I didn't steer you in the wrong direction with this one. Thanks for opening my eyes to another way of doing it. Happy brewing!
