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January, 1996 Volume 19, Issue 1 Mocha Beers by Bryan Gros Hopefully everyone is not sick of weird Christmas beers yet. This article summarizes comments I received from the HomeBrew Digest this year on experiences with chocolate and/or coffee in beers. There are two starting points if you are interested in these beers. One is a recipe called Mocha Java Stout in the Cat's Meow II, a collection of brewing recipes from the Digest. There is an on-line version at the web site The Brewery (http://alpha.rollanet.org) and I believe there is a hard copy in the club library. The second place to start is a recipe in Charlie Papazian's book New Complete Joy of Homebrewing called Goat Scrotum Ale.
As for coffee, I got more experience here. People often describe the taste of the roast barley in a stout as coffee-like, so this combination of ingredients may be more obvious. There are a lot of options when adding coffee though. Dave Draper added 2 tbsp. of ground coffee in the last 5 minutes of the boil and reported good results with Wyeast 1084: a subtle coffee flavor. John DeCarlo used 1/4 pound unground in the secondary and reported that this was way too much coffee. Little beer flavor was evident. Also, every coffee book and pamphlet that I've ever read has warned against boiling the beans or the coffee. This means don't put any coffee in the boil. The most controlled way to add coffee, and the way that Bruce Brazil would probably recommend, is to add it to taste in the bottling bucket or keg. Dave Draper also, in a different brew, added a "large mug" of strong coffee before bottling and said the beer was good. Another responder mentioned adding two 4-cup pots of espresso to a mocha java stout recipe (he added cocoa to the secondary) before bottling. You'll have to experiment with the amount of coffee to add, but if you add it before bottling/kegging, you can taste it as you add it. This brings up another idea: use chocolate extract from the grocery store. Add it to taste. And report back on your results. Mocha Java Stout (From Cat's Meow)
This recipe says to add the chocolate to the boil for the last 10 min. and add the coffee when you turn off the heat.
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When adding chocolate to a
beer, think about the finished flavor first. Cocoa adds a
significant bitterness to a beer, so keep this in mind.
Reduce your boiling hops. Also, be sure to use a beer
with some body and maltiness to balance this bitterness.
The winner of the holiday beer category of BABO last year
was a chocolate beer, and it had the right amount of
sweetness and cocoa flavor in it. Unfortunately, we don't
get the recipes in the entry package. I used 1/4 cup of
powdered cocoa in a porter, and got a good cocoa aroma,
but little flavor. It wasn't a very good porter, either,
which didn't help. Other people have used baking
chocolate, but some have commented that the oils and
butterfat have seized up and clumped in the fermenter.
Also, the oils can coat the carboy and the bottles and
reduce the head on the beer. These people have reported
good chocolate flavor with this method though. I'd try
cocoa first.