ultravista wrote:Bokonon - how much coffee and cacao nibs did you add and how did it turn out? Was it close to the real thing?
Would you mind posting the recipe?
I used 12 oz of coffee that a friend roasted for me, a blend of 3 different beans don't recall off hand what they were and 12oz of nibs. This was in a 12 gallon batch
It's basically carbonated coffee, a nice breakfast beer but way unbalanced. I cold steeped the dark grains and I should have just tossed them in the mash, I get a ton of coffee flavor/aroma but very little malt.
I'd say it was a good first attempt but needs some adjustment if/when I brew it. Definitely throw the dark grains in the mash and not cold steep them (or use significantly more than I did, I doubled what I normally would have put in a similar beer and that wasn't enough). I would knock the quantity of coffee back if I kept the gravity the same, or keep the same amount of coffee and kick the gravity up to 1.085ish.
I might end up brewing a porter/stout with no coffee and blending some of this in to make it more balanced.
Here is what I did for a 13 gal batch. I thought I had more chocolate malt in my inventory but I didn't so I used some of the other dark malts I had laying around.
22# pale malt
3# munich
2# Flaked barley
1# Crystal 15
1# Crystal 60
I cold steeped these (in the mash I'd cut them about in half and increase the base malt):
1.25# Chocolate malt
.75# Pale Chocolate malt
.75# Kilned coffee malt
.5# Black Patent
.25# Carafa III
2oz Galena 9% AA @ 60
2oz Fuggles 2.5% AA @ 45
2oz Fuggles 2.5% AA @ 30
2oz EKG 3.5% @ 15
Cold steeped in fermenter for 24 hours at end of fermentation
12oz Course ground coffee blend
12oz Cacoa nibs