Chocolate Coffee Vanilla Stout

This beer is both a success and a bit of a letdown.

First the letdown. I intended to brew something along the lines of Stone Xocoveza. That's a really great beer, but it's expensive, and, plus, it's fun to try to homebrew a beer that rivals the real the thing. I started with the same base beer that I used for my chocolate coffee porter last year, though slightly modified. I considered all the ingredients I'd use and researched various clone recipes.

The biggest question, though, was how to get the chocolate flavor into the beer. In my porter, I added cacao nibs to the keg, but for some reason -- perhaps I didn't use enough, or maybe the coffee overwhelmed the flavor -- the chocolate just didn't come through in the resultant beer. So after reading some articles and watching a Northern Brewer video, I decided I'd try baker's chocolate. Research indicated that a long and vigorous boil would break down the fats in the chocolate. So I added eight ounces of baker's chocolate at the beginning of the oil. I can now report that the research is wrong.

The fat does not "go away." It stays right there in your kettle. So, right before racking to the fermenter, I spent a decent amount of time skimming oil from the top of the wort. I never got it all. In fact, it more or less blended into the beer, disappointingly not settling to the bottom. After being in the fermenter for three months, a layer of fat remained floating on top of hte beer. This was alarming to say the least.

I tried the beer. It was moderately astringent, presumably due to the suspended cocoa oils or from the cocoa itself. I considered giving up on the beer altogether, but I stuck with it.

I kegged it and added gelatin. That seemed to help with removing the solid particles and it cleared the beer, but the astringency never went away.

By now, I had given up on making this a Xocoveza clone. Instead, I decided I'd just add coffee, and, for the heck of it, a vanilla bean, since Brown Derby, just down the street, had Madagascar vanilla beans for about $1.50 each.

That astringency really disheartened me, though, so I just kept putting off adding the coffee and vanilla. Finally, about three or four weeks after kegging, I decided I'd waited long enough.

I had trouble with bits of ground coffee in my porter last time. So this time, I decided I needed to figure out how to make it coarser. Crushing it in a plastic bag? Nope, didn't work; took too long. So I just got out my coffee grinder again.

I ground three ounces of Heroes Kenya coffee as coarsely as I could. I transferred it between two paint bags three or four times and shook the bag, which removed a lot of coffee dust.

Next, I split the vanilla bean down the middle. I added the coffee and vanilla bean to a paint bag and dropped in the beer. Voila, coffee vanilla stout.

The beer looks really nice, with a tan to brown head. Carbonation is slightly low, but seems to be in line with the style. Aroma is coffee and chocolate malt. Fairly clear, surprisingly. The head retention seems better this time around, since I was able to get rid of those small coffee bits. The vanilla is pretty intense, and so is the coffee for that matter. But the chocolate is really no where to be found. If I try using coffee again, I'll probably use nibs, but in the boil, not in the keg. I will not be using baker's chocolate again. The coffee and vanilla seem to have hidden the astringency, which is a relief.

All in all, not a bad beer; it's just not the one I aimed to make starting out. But that's ok, it's still pretty tasty.