Willy Weizenbier Posted June 25 Report Share Posted June 25 My missus is finding her Old Saxony a little light on chocolate/coffee flavours. Just wondering, has anyone tried adding dark chocolate and/or a pinch of actual coffee to their brewdroid and had good results? How about a piece of chocolate to substitute a carbonation drop in the bottle (if bottling)? Interested... Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thagomizer Posted June 26 Report Share Posted June 26 @Willy Weizenbier: Welcome to the forum. Coffee and chocolate.... You can certainly try these ingredients. Some suppliers offer chocolate additives for brewing beer, and you can easily add coffee. Unless you have specific recipes, I would recommend small amounts of these ingredients and then add to taste in subsequent brews. I would add a modicum of freshly brewed high quality coffee as part of the ten-liter starting liquid for a brewprint. Chocolate is more challenging. I do not recommend substituting chocolate candy for priming sugar. Most uses of cacao nibs or chocolate malt involve steeping or mashing. This is very doable but goes well beyond the simplicity of the BrewArt system. However, the wort you create still is brewed in the droid with a minimum of effort. Remember that any suitable wort (in a ten-liter batch) can be successfully brewed in the droid. As to finding cacao bits or chocolate malt, mrbeer.com, (a BrewArt-owned company) offers these products. 🙂 Happy brewing. And let us know the results of your experiments. 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willy Weizenbier Posted June 29 Author Report Share Posted June 29 That’s good advice. Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Gyldenvand Posted June 29 Report Share Posted June 29 On 26/06/2024 at 6:59 PM, Thagomizer said: I would add a modicum of freshly brewed high quality coffee as part of the ten-liter starting liquid for a brewprint. Okay, this got me thinking...always a treacherous undertaking for me. I have a Traditional Irish Stout in my current lineup, probably for late next month or early August. Bride loves her some Guinness now and then, and is a pure sucker for coffee beers (Sunday breakfast beer, hereabouts.) So, now I'm going to go ahead and give this a try. Big Question: how much fresh-brewed coffee do I add to my batch of stout? Anybody? Slainte! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thagomizer Posted June 29 Report Share Posted June 29 I have checked out some recipes from Mr. Beer on using coffee and chocolate. Contrary to my concept of adding coffee to the wort at brewing time, they add an ounce of expresso to each bottle at bottling time. However, more subtle flavors can be obtained by actually brewing with the coffee. Also, cocoa powder or melted chocolate can be added to the wort with a lot of stirring. This is before fermentation. This does not involve steeping or mashing. Again, better results could be obtained by steeping or mashing cacao nibs or chocolate malt blends. 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Gyldenvand Posted August 25 Report Share Posted August 25 Well, off to a good start. I decided not to add coffee to the Irish Stout batch, but I had the ingredients on hand to start a Shadow Hill Porter, so I started there. In the following few days I read a lot of online suggestions for a coffee addition, and finding no real consensus on a perfect plan, I improvised. At kegging notification, I added the hops sachets, along with a half-cup of ground espresso roast in my stainless hop bomb. I figured it was a reasonable place to start. Today I bottled, and the taste-test simply blew our minds! My Bride is a particular fan of coffee-infused porters, and she just said, "yeah, nailed it" before finishing the sample glass. Of course, time will tell if it holds up to conditioning, but it sure seems promising. Sláinte! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thagomizer Posted August 26 Report Share Posted August 26 Congratulations on your experiment, Steve. Putting fresh-ground coffee beans into a hop bomb is innovative. I have been leery of adding brewed coffee to a batch, so this will certainly be a winner if it ages well. Please let us know. 😀 Happy brewing. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Gyldenvand Posted August 26 Report Share Posted August 26 Thanks Thag. I should have mentioned that the espresso grind was fine enough that some of the grounds did pass through the screen on the hop bomb, but they were heavy enough that they pretty much remained in the trub on the bottom of the droid. Nothing clogged and there was no evidence of grounds in the beer. Sláinte! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrewArt Team Posted August 27 Report Share Posted August 27 Hey Gang, Great thread you have here, with some good information. For what it's worth I thought I'd add my two cents. My favourite method of adding coffee flavours to beer is 'Dry Beaning'. Just add whole coffee beans directly to your BeerDroid like you would Dry Hops. Then you can just use the Dry Hop Filter to remove them prior to bottling/kegging. Just be sure not to leave the coffee beans in contact with the beer for too long. 48 hours is a good place to start. Also adding them while the BeerDroid is in Storage Mode is a good idea as well. Start with 50g / 10L and go up or down from there. Be careful with adding actual chocolate into your beer as chocolate contains a lot of fat which can affect your head retention. Using Cacao nibs is my preferred method, and they are added in naked like the coffee beans. Happy experimenting! Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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