I did it pretty much according to the recipe but we used a little more chocolate & we used semi sweet chips, a little more than called for.
We made 2 batches side by side on my stove. He kegged his, I bottled mine.
The only thing I'd do differently is maybe buy it from Jasper's homebrew (for the first time) instead of assembling everything myself, but no regrets, at all. I drank a bunch of bottles before it even carbed up after trying some from his tap.
This makes Guiness taste like fizzy yellow water - you won't drink it again!!!
It's a lot more coffee (grounds) than I expected...flavor is good.
not much - I figured since it was supposed to be darker it'd be fine, plus the higher sugar or lactose would make it a little higher %. Just cracked another 22oz of it warm. Nice head, great flavor imo.
I just went and grabbed some OLD 'pure' vanilla extract from my cabinet-----it's probably 6 years old. I added a couple drops to half a pint - ehhhhh, you could taste it, then I added quite a bit more and it was good but I might look for something that's intended to be a vanilla stout instead of changing this one too much - it's good enough as-is!
Maybe cut the chocolate by >half and add ???? homemade vanilla extract + heavy coffee ------ good vs evil this one I tell ya.
So after 2 weeks I racked it to the secondary. What a sludge at the bottem of the bucket. Really a waste. I only was able to get about 4 gallons from the primary. All the chocolate and yeast I felt was at the bottom. Inthought about taking a scoop and throwing it also in the secondary, but did not. Did you all have that too? It was a wild fermentation also. I was happy to put a blow off on it, but the gravity after 2 weeks show it still has much more to go. Thoughts?
Brewed this about three weeks ago, picked up the ingredients at my LHBS and had to make some substitutions but nothing substantial. OG was spot-on at 1.073 (according to BeerSmith), just checked a few minutes ago and it's at 1.019, so ready to bottle. I didn't secondary, so we'll see how that turns out. Tasting my gravity sample gave a lot of up-front coffee, with no chocolate at all (weird). I also noticed my sample had a pretty serious gradient, with the bottom being almost pale, and shading to just about black at the top. I'm very curious to give this one a try, picked up a 4-pack of FBS (which I had never tried) and I was kind of "meh", hopefully I'll like this version better!
Any update?
Update: Cracked open the first one of these last night, still too green to be sure, but the taste has changed dramatically. The coffee flavor has faded, leaving a muddled mess behind. More bitter than a stout should be, with no chocolate anywhere. I'm sure it'll improve over the next few weeks.
i did this one and added only 8oz of dark baker's choco squares, and 3 oz of locally roasted costa rican beans. on top of this, added 10 oz of unsweetened organic coconut, toasted in a dry skillet in a vodka "extract".
in the top 3 kits from jaspers and i buy from them often.
to do it again, i'd up the choco to 12 oz and rack over and let rest for 1 month.
mine was kegged, and it was amazeballs. YES, i'd also add a vanilla bean to the coconut extract.
it was like a caffeinated almond joy.
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