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Homebrewing: Espresso Stoutby Ryan Jacobs Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 Our example: Espresso StoutThis homebrew combines the flavors of a chocolate style stout with freshly brewed espresso to kick it up a notch. I also used espresso which I roasted and brewed myself. I fully believe that the overall fresh taste of this brew has everything to do with using quality ingredients -- especially the espresso. For this recipe, I used a custom blended espresso designed for this stout. The Espresso BlendBlending coffee is not altogether different from selecting the hop additions for a beer. The goal is certainly the same: to attain a certain flavor by utilizing the different characteristics of the ingredients in specific manners. Just as bittering hops will provide the base bittering for your hops, so does selecting a base bean for espresso serve the same purpose in your blend. Beyond normal espresso blending, you should consider the purpose for which the espresso will be used. Will it be used in primarily milk based drinks, Americanos, straight-up, or in stout? Since the stout is a chocolate stout, it makes sense to try and complement that flavor by the espresso. You will notice that this blend isn't extremely dark or oily for an espresso, but as far as espresso goes, I have never found extremely oily blends to be particularly good. Furthermore, this brewed espresso will be added to five gallons of beer! It turns out that excess oils added to beer kill the head retention and thus the overall body of the beer. Needless to say, a very oily stout is not very desirable. Here is my espresso recipe:
You should feel free to try another espresso blend after you see how this one turns out. The important thing is that by roasting it yourself, you know exactly how old and how fresh the coffee is. Just like hop varieties vary from year to year and crop to crop -- so do coffees. Homebrewers love to tweak, and with coffee, there is a lot of tweaking that can be done! If you prefer to use a pre-blended espresso to roast, I recommend the Liquid Amber Espresso Blend available from Sweet Maria's. Furthermore, if you aren't a homeroaster, a good espresso available for this beer is the Americano Espresso Blend, available from Stauf's Coffee Roaster. Ingredients
ProcedureAdd 1.5 gallons of water to the boiling kettle. Put all of the grains into a grain bag, and tie it up as shown below.
Since we are using distilled water, we will adjust the water hardness by adding brewing salts. For this recipe, I have added 2 tsp. Calcium Chloride and 1 tsp. Magnesium Sulfate. This is a very important step which, if overlooked, will render your beer lifeless. The salts give body to the beer and also help to extract sugars from the grains. This partial mash should cook for 30 minutes at 160°-170°F.
After this partial mash has been completed, remove the grain bag carefully from the kettle and add the malt extract with just over a half gallon of water, taking great care to keep stirring until fully dissolved. It is very important to pay attention to prevent a "boil-over" from occuring at this stage. At thirty minutes into the boil, we will make our first hop addition. We will add 1.5 oz of the Northern Brewer hops and continue boiling.
MultitaskingWhile we are waiting for the next hop addition, we can prepare several things. First, we prepare a hop bag by placing the remaining .5 oz of Northern Brewer and the .5 oz of Willamette Hops into the bag which will make up our second hop addition. We will also sanitize the carboy. This can be done with either oxidized bleach cleaners or an iodophor solution. I prefer the iodophor as it sanitizes faster and requires no rinsing. Whichever you choose, mix the cleaner to the strength indicated on the instructions and add this to the carboy. Then, use the bottle brush to swirl the solution around and make sure all of the surface has been covered. You should spare no effort in sanitizing your equipment.
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