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All my favourite recipes

Chocolate Stout

Before you start consider your water profile; for this beer we want to achieve a ratio of chloride to sulphate around 2.85 to 1.

The grist will depend a little on what you have available but by weight we used;

Mashing in; we used a ratio of 2.6 litres of liquor for each kilo of grist and targeted a mash temperature of 63 celsius for 60 minutes. Keep an eye on your mash pH, it should be between 5.2 and 5.5. The sparge ran at 74 celsius and we stopped collecting wort before the pH rose above 5.6 and the specific gravity of the run-off went below 1.006.

Hop Regime; we used Phoenix at a rate of 50g/hl at the start of the 60 minute boil. 65g/hl of Sorachi Ace were added after 30 minutes and a further 60g/hl with five minutes of the boil to go.

At flameout we recirculated the wort to cool and then added 75g/hl of Sorachi Ace and let it stand for 15 minutes before sending it to the fermentation room via the chiller.

Any clean profile yeast will probably work in this beer; we used a strain similar to US05 which you can pitch at the rate suggested by your yeast supplier. Fermentation ran at 18 celcius with a top temperature of 23 celcius.

The dry hop is 30g/hl each of sorachi ace and mosaic. We always use T90 pellets and add them toward the end of primary fermentation.

This beer then uses chocolate / cocoa powder which we added at the rate of 150g/hl. It is difficult to effectively mix the powder in with the beer and not introduce lots of oxygen. We found it easiest to add the powder with about two gravity points above the predicted end point.

Once the beer has reached final gravity, chill it down to less than 4 celcius, zero if you can, then wait for the yeast and cocoa to settle out with the dry hops. After this you can rack or send to your own maturation vessel before filling bottles or kegs.

Does it matter what bread we use? and do we have to do anything special to it?

Not really - we’ll go to a local bakery together at end of a day and ask for whatever they have leftover 👍. It’ll only be a loaf at this volume. Hopefully a nice sourdough or bloomer.

For a 25L brew

Our brewer gave me these rough conversions for 25l brew. Do they look about right for your experience?