Stout advice??

[JamesPorter]

Hi guys,

I have purchased a Brigalow Stout kit the other month and its time I used it!!

I was thinking of using it to make two stouts. A chocolate and a coconut stout.

But I'm unsure how.

Would I need to brew as the instructions say then transfer into a secondary carboy and add some form of chocolate/coconut???

What kind of chocolate would you guys suggest I use??

Suggestions welcome!!

Thanks guys.

 

[balauru_327]

Follow the instructions. For the chocolate, try dark chocolate with high procent of cacao, and for coconut i don`t know, but i think coconut milk is good(it has more aroma than the white thing, i don`t know how to say it)

 

[woknblues]

There are a lot of choolate stouts in the recipe section of this forum. I would suggest you read through a few and get a feel of what the recipes call for and what to expect. Heck, I bet someone has done a "mounds" stout or something like that already!!

Sounds pretty good to me for the record. i would fear that coconut being high in oil would kill the head on your beer, but I could be wrong.

 

[JLem]

I've never used coconut, but it's been done, so I'm sure you can find some good info out there.

For the chocolate, I've seen two major ways to go and I've used one of them with excellent results. The first way is to add unsweetened cocoa powder at the end of the boil. I believe Jamil Z suggests this approach for his hazelnut chocolate porter. The second way, and the one I have direct experience with, is to rack the beer to secondary and add 4-8 oz of cacao nibs, essentially broken up bits of the cacao bean shell. I did this with a dark wheat wine I made last year and got a wonderful chocolate aroma and flavor.