Porter & Chocolate
So tonight I transfered the Porters to secondaries, one of which is now in line to be Chocolate Porter.
Raw Chocolate and vanilla beans in a porter, yum. Well, porter light, but hopefully it’ll still be all good. So, part of the attraction of doing 10 gallon batches for me is that I can split the batches into 5 gallons of traditional been and 5gallons of an experiment. So this time we have 5 gallons of a Robust Brown Porter and 5 gallons of a Chocolate Porter. I racked one of the carboys of beer onto 8oz of Cacao Nibs and 1 split, scraped, and quartered vanilla bean. It should be pretty good. I figure I’ll let the beer sit in secondary for about two weeks on the nibs and beans and then taste to see how it is progressing. Cacao Nibs are raw chocolate, they were sort of the consistency of coffee beans and chocolate chunks mixed together. Honestly they barely even tasted like dark chocolate, but they smelt like heavenly baked brownies, it smelt just like the air in Hershey, PA.
Hopefully these little suckers aren’t going to make racking to a third carboy or keg a royal pain in the ass, we’ll see!
June 29th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Hopefully your next 10 gallon batch will be less eventful. I have a feeling that after you get a couple under your belt, you will only reluctantly fall back to doing 5 gallons at a time. Before long, you might even start eyeballing those 25 gallon kettles…
June 29th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Maybe not a 25 gallon kettle, but a 15 gallon kettle is definitely on the radar after the kegerator, which should be ordered this week!
June 29th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Saweeeeeeeeeeeet!!! And about time!
July 1st, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Okay, you know I am not a connessiur (sp?) of beer but I gotta tell you the visual of the vanilla bean and the cocoa is quite mouth watering. I hope it works out and is a wonderful experiment that becomes a regular.