Chocolate coffee stout

[Cheyne_brewer]

I’m hoping to make a chocolate coffee stout for Xmas. I have a GEB Oatmeal Breakfast stout as base, 125g cocoa nibs and a load of good quality ground coffee. The stout should end up around 6% and hopefully slightly sweet.

Is it unreasonable to throw the whole 125g of nibs in (after a quick soak in boiling water, adding the lot into the hop spider 30 mins from flame out or would I be better doing 50g in the boil then adding the rest in a hop bag near the end of fermentation? Or even all in at flame out?

I’ll be making up a strong brew of Colombian ground coffee to go into the FV at the end to keep the aroma. The whole lot will be sealed & into the fridge for two weeks.

 

[strange-steve]

One issue with cacao nibs is that there's a ton of fat in them which will potentially ruin the head retention of the beer. One way to get around this is to make a tincture by soaking the nibs in vodka for a few days, strain them off and discard them, put the liquid in the freezer and skim off the fat as it solidifies on the surface, then add it to the beer at bottling/kegging time. I did this with my last chocolate stout, I think I used about 150g of nibs and it worked well, added a nice dark chocolate flavour.

 

[BeerCat]

Soaking nibs in water wont do much good. Roast them at 100c for 15 mins and add directly to secondary. Never had any issues with fat. I buy the unroasted nibs. Lot more flavour once they have been in the oven, just make sure to turn them.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Be careful (very careful) with the coffee... I was able to sample some coffee and cocoa nib brew during the summer that a friend had made - it was excellent ale in all respects, but the flavour was a bit like ashtrays