Christmas brewing

Posted on November 28, 2006 by Chris Lumens in .

Last night, I made the first beer here at my new place. The recipe is an idea Sarah and I came up with last winter for this year’s Christmas seasonal. The basic idea is a stout with chocolate and cherries added. I used my Oatmeal Stout recipe as the starting point. I removed the oatmeal, added a body-enhancing grain, and added real chocolate. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time agonizing over the details of the recipe for once. I decided to go with a pound of baker’s chocolate and cherry extract. Working with real fruit is really difficult and adds a lot of time to the procedure. Since I’m trying to have this drinkable by the end of the year, using the extract speeds the process up quite a bit.

Brewing went very smoothly. At first I thought I might have some problems getting used to the new stove, but temperature control was fine. The highlight of the brewing process was definitely adding the chocolate. It required a lot of stirring to keep from sticking to the bottom of the pot, but the smell was great - like hot cocoa. Overall, it took about three hours to brew from boiling to pitching. The finished product didn’t turn out black at all, though. It’s just about as brown as things can get. I blame this on poor extraction from the roasted barley and from removing the dark malt extract in favor of more light malt extract. So I missed the color by a pretty wide margin, but I hit the specific gravity right on at 1.052.

This morning there wasn’t much fermentation activity at all, but it’s picked up quite a bit now. I’m told that all the oils in the chocolate will prevent much of a head from forming in the top of the carboy so I probably won’t need a blow off hose but I attached one just in case. One carboy explosion was enough to teach me that lesson.

Edit:

Here is the recipe for this beer. I have named it in honor of the fact that it was bottled on December 10 and there’s still no snow on the ground. I didn’t feel right naming it something involving winter or Christmas when it still barely feels like it here.