mint chocolate stout

[gnuworldorder]

so me and a friend use to brew together but now we found other friends to brew with and we were thinking about doing a brewoff and we settled on using a midwest stout kid. before we did an outmeal stout and added a pound of cocoa powder and 2oz of mint leaves with 5 minutes left to the boil then in the secondary fermenter add 1/2 a cup of mint. it turned out pretty decent but was was too much of a bitter chocolate taste. so the logical step is to perfect this since i doubt he would see this coming.

so my question would be coming from an irish stout kit, double the chocolate malt to 8oz, cut the cocoa powder to 4oz since most just precipitated out in the primary, add 4oz of oats like the oatmeal stout kit had and then add maybe 4-8oz of lactose to sweeten it up and keep the mint the same.

in my head i see it working but thats just me wanting to win and we really dont have the time to make a test run first so any help would be nice

 

[Oldsock]

4-8 oz of cocoa is about the right range for me (I like making a paste with hot water and adding it after fermentation ends).

Your plan sounds fine, although I might go with a bigger/richer base beer rather than building on an Irish stout kit. You can always add lactose at bottling to taste. If you are doing extract with steeping grains I'd skip the oatmeal, it has starches so it really needs to be mashed.

I did a mint chocolate stout a few years ago, but we used dried peppermint. It worked well I thought, but it depends on what sort of mint flavor you want.

Hope that helps, and welcome to the site.

 

[KyleWolf]

I have found that when adding cocoa to a beer, you want to make a paste like Oldstock says, though if you use an alcohol (I use creme de cacao for even more chocolate), the cocoa goes into solution more readily compared to water where it tends to be in suspension.

 

[gnuworldorder]

oldsock starting with a different base would defeat the point of having both teams start on the same level. i just can think of anything other than a coffee stout which i hate coffee, a cherry stout and a russian imperial stout.