There’s a reason I called this brew “Chocolate Death” in earlier posts. As a stout, the beer had plenty of roasted barley and black patent malt. Yet I decided early on in the process to make sure that I used a ton of chocolate malt. It’s not as coffee tasting as the black patent and roasted barley, and I love it. Mission accomplished. The beer was already very layered and complex. The bitter bite of the malts, coffee, and roasted quality were very pronounced from the roasted barley and black patent malt. At the same time, there was a velvety smoothness from the chocolate malt, which was absurdly good. However, I wanted to emphasize the chocolate more.
Vanilla and cocoa beans seemed to be the obvious solution. I wrote a post about the process of roasting the cocoa beans a while back, along with some notes about my experiment. At any rate, I ended up adding the vanilla beans early on while opting to wait for the cocoa beans (I knew that would be a more involved process). The vanilla beans were added as is; this was a point in the process when I was concerned very little about bacterial contamination. After all, 20% ABV beer is pretty inhospitable to micro-organisms.
Having added the vanilla beans, I thought the beer was damn good and wondered whether I should have added the cocoa beans as well. After vacillating on the topic, I decided that I had bought them for that purpose, and I would use them to that end. So, I finally roasted the beans and put them into the fermenter. After a couple weeks of cocoa beans, I decided the beer was ready.
Finally, after three months of aging, work, and detailed attention, I had a beer that was 20% and worth bottling. That beer is now resting comfortably and (I hope) getting just the smallest amount of CO2 in it. But I was far short of where I wanted to be. I was hoping for a 25% beer. Like I said, I’ve got ways to improve the process in the future and plan to revisit the extreme beer.
Looking back, I thought about the fact that I had accomplished something pretty special even if I didn’t do exactly what I set out to do. But defeat was not quite nigh. There were two more stages in the process of making my beer that I’d yet to unleash. This is where the thickness of the beer came in handy. It didn’t even taste close to be 20% ABV because of the sweetness. Now it was possible to try some bourbon aging…
Every post sounds awesomner and awesomner! Theis beer will be the awsomness!
[Reply]
beer_scientist Reply:
March 22nd, 2010 at 7:47 am
I love this beer. Can’t wait to finish the posts. I actually ordered some 7 ounces bottles so that that I could get a couple more out of it.
[Reply]
[...] Last time, I mentioned that I had two stages left in my process. The next to last stage was bourbon barreling the beer. I didn’t have a bourbon barrel. I did have bourbon, and I did have oak chips. That was enough for me. I took some of the oak chips and decided to let them soak in some of the bourbon. While that was happening, I did some calculations to figure out what sort of effect I would get by adding bourbon. Through a ratio field test (the lay way of saying that I made some extreme boilermakers to see how the bourbon would come through), I settled on an appropriate level of bourbon. [...]
This sounds so good. If you had the opportunity, would you force carbonate it since naturally it won’t happen much?
[Reply]
I don’t know. I’m actually getting carbonation on the “normal” beer because of the yeast still being alive. I’m inclined to say that I would force carbonate half the bottles just to see what would happen. Who doesn’t like a nice head on their beer? That being said, as big as it is, I’m not sure that a still beer would be inappropriate.
[Reply]