Black Coffee in Beer
With the nights drawing in it was time to brew a dark beer, and in a radical move I decided to add an extra ingredient to the usual line-up of water, malt, hops and yeast. This beer also contained coffee, and just to make it extra crafty I used cold brewed coffee. As this was a bit of an experiment for me I only brewed a small batch of nine litres split into two demijohns.
Recipe (BIAB):
- Mash for 1 hr at 67°C
- Boil for 60 mins
- Mash water volume 13.6lt
- Pale Malt 1.35kg
- Crystal 15L 160g
- Chocolate Malt 110g
- Black malt 50g
- Rolled Oats 180g
- Northdown 25g (60 mins)
- Northdown 25g (0 mins)
- Gervin GV12 English Ale Yeast 11g pack
- 100ml cold brewed coffee (added to one demijohn)
- Recipe in Brewers Friend
Naturally things didn't go totally as planned, firstly my efficiency was way down at 61% (usually I get around 75%) which meant I was going to end up with an ABV of 3.95%, a lot lower than what I wanted. I also managed to miscalculate the hop additions, this was a scaled down recipe but I didn't reduce the hops at the same rate as the malts resulting in a higher IBU rating than originally expected. Obviously I couldn't do much about the hops but I decided to increase the ABV by adding some brewing sugar (dextrose) to the fermenters. I made a solution with 80g of dextrose and 200ml of boiling water, allowed it to cool and then split it between the two demijohns. I have never done this before but it seemed to work. I made the addition after two days fermentation and there was certainly some increased airlock activity and a final gravity reading of 1.010 would indicate a theoretical ABV of 4.42% which is a bit of an improvement. The downside of adding sugar is it tends to make the beer taste thinner and less full-bodied but hopefully I've got the balance right by just adding a small amount.
I made the cold brewed coffee by mixing 50g of coarse ground coffee with 350ml of water in a sterilised mason jar and leaving it in the fridge for 24 hours. I then filtered it several times to remove all the grounds and added 100ml to one of the demijohns after four days of fermentation. I left this for another week and then bottled both beers. Each demijohn contained 4.25 litres so I primed each with 20g of brewing sugar. Now I have 12 x 330ml of each stout conditioning, one with coffee and one without. It will be interesting to see how they compare and whether the coffee actually improves the beer.
- Mash for 1 hr at 67°C
- Boil for 60 mins
- Mash water volume 13.6lt
- Pale Malt 1.35kg
- Crystal 15L 160g
- Chocolate Malt 110g
- Black malt 50g
- Rolled Oats 180g
- Northdown 25g (60 mins)
- Northdown 25g (0 mins)
- Gervin GV12 English Ale Yeast 11g pack
- 100ml cold brewed coffee (added to one demijohn)
- Recipe in Brewers Friend
Naturally things didn't go totally as planned, firstly my efficiency was way down at 61% (usually I get around 75%) which meant I was going to end up with an ABV of 3.95%, a lot lower than what I wanted. I also managed to miscalculate the hop additions, this was a scaled down recipe but I didn't reduce the hops at the same rate as the malts resulting in a higher IBU rating than originally expected. Obviously I couldn't do much about the hops but I decided to increase the ABV by adding some brewing sugar (dextrose) to the fermenters. I made a solution with 80g of dextrose and 200ml of boiling water, allowed it to cool and then split it between the two demijohns. I have never done this before but it seemed to work. I made the addition after two days fermentation and there was certainly some increased airlock activity and a final gravity reading of 1.010 would indicate a theoretical ABV of 4.42% which is a bit of an improvement. The downside of adding sugar is it tends to make the beer taste thinner and less full-bodied but hopefully I've got the balance right by just adding a small amount.
I made the cold brewed coffee by mixing 50g of coarse ground coffee with 350ml of water in a sterilised mason jar and leaving it in the fridge for 24 hours. I then filtered it several times to remove all the grounds and added 100ml to one of the demijohns after four days of fermentation. I left this for another week and then bottled both beers. Each demijohn contained 4.25 litres so I primed each with 20g of brewing sugar. Now I have 12 x 330ml of each stout conditioning, one with coffee and one without. It will be interesting to see how they compare and whether the coffee actually improves the beer.
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