Beer Forum

Hello All,
I didn't find a recipe for this so I made one up with my brew gang. We started with the BCS Oatmeal Stout recipe and brewed up 10 gallons. Bottled 5 straight, and experimented with the other 5 gallons.
In the bottling bucket we added .5lb cocoa powder and 1/4t chipotle powder. Stirred it up and bottled 12 12oz bottles. Labeled them C1. Added another 1/4t chipotle powder, stirred, bottled. Labeled them C2.
And so on for C3. And then doubled the chipotle in there for a total of 1 1/2t per gallon. We called that C4.
We didn't add any more cocoa powder at all.

Let them sit for a few weeks and started in on them. The C1 was almost unnoticeable. The C2 was better but still light. If you aren't looking for any real heat then this is where to start. The C3 is good heat. I'm not a really hot spicy fan. So I passed on the C4. But those who had it loved it. Even my non beer friends.
The regular cocoa powder we added, did add a slight rust/acid bite. For the 2nd round of this that we bottled today we used dutched cocoa powder. It will be a few weeks before we know how that worked.

Zietgeist

How did the second one turn out. I tried something similar but used 2 oz cocoa nibs and 2 jalpenos into 2.5 gallon batch. Waiting on the results now. Worried I didn't get any heat just pepper flavor and no chocolate flavor.

So we've done this several times by now. Since my original post. It's been soo good and a favorite. The C1 was almost unnoticeable. And not worth doing. The C2 had some chipolte, but still not really worth mentioning. The C3 was the sweet spot and what we have been recreating since. Has some good kick, but it's overwhelming. For people who really like spicy food, the C4 was heavenly. But more than I could take. Or enjoy. If you like spicy hot food, make the C4. Thank me later.

I've tried cocoa nibs. And been very disappointed. I recommend cocoa powder in the secondary. I also recommend dutched cocoa powder and reduce your bittering hop addition a bit. As the cocoa adds a slight bittering of it's own. We've been liking the ratio of .5 lb per 5 gallons. And haven't really changed that. If you like more chocolate, adjust as you see fit.

I do like the smokiness of the chipolte. And would use that over straight jalpenos. But that's a taste preference. Did you dice up your jalpenos?

I would taste it soon and perhaps add the dutched cocoa powder for the chocolate. Let me know how it comes out. I'd love to hear.

beerhawk wrote:How did the second one turn out. I tried something similar but used 2 oz cocoa nibs and 2 jalpenos into 2.5 gallon batch. Waiting on the results now. Worried I didn't get any heat just pepper flavor and no chocolate flavor.

I've never done nibs and peppers in the same batch, but in my pepper beers I've used less peppers in twice the size batch. I wouldn't worry about heat. One was a single Anaheim in a 10 gallon batch. The heat was definitely there. So much that it took 6ish weeks of aging before it mellowed into a fantastic beer. The earlier flavor was way, way too much. More pepper matter than a jalapeno, but much less on the Scoville scale. Food for thought. Pepper beers are the one that I've had the most trouble dialing in & also repeating reliably, but I've only done maybe 8-10 of them. The best one was an anaheim, 1/2 poblano & I pureed a depithed/deseeded habenaro, adding about 0.25 mL of the filtered juice. Took a while to come down, but when it did it was mindblowing.

Nibs I've used twice, so I can't comment much on those at all. 1 was good, 1 got infected.

I would agree that young spiced or cocoa/nibs beer are bad. They need a bit of age to really shine.