YGingras^.net

I'm a brewer. I like to brew beer, I like to share the results, and I like to incorporate the feed back that I receive in order to improve. I am fortunate because we have a great brewing club here in Montréal and it's a very effective source of informed feedback.

Being part of a club means that you have a bunch of brewers of different levels who can give you advice. Once in a while, we meet and samples each others brew and comment on what could push these brews a little further on the greatness scale.

Senior members of the MontreAlers also team up with the Canadian Amateur Brewers Association to organize a yearly brewing competition and for the first time, I decided to submit an entry.

Daniel Haran is the former lead organizer of the Montreal.rb ruby user group, I am the lead organizer of Montréal-Python, but when I met him for the first time, instead of talking about user groups, we ended up talking about food. It turns out that Daniel is also a chocolate home roasters. He is very knowledgeable in the different quality of various cocoa beans and we agreed to work on a project together: Vénus Noire, an Imperial Chocolate Stout.

Cocoa beans are very oily; this is what makes chocolate bars hold their shape but it's problematic for brewing since any kind of oil is detrimental to the formation of a thick and durable foamy head. Most beer ingredients are added at boil-time when the heat will help to extract flavor and aroma. In the case of cocoa, the risk of extracting cocoa oils during the boils calls for an alternative strategy: room temperature extraction.

Not a lot of extraction is going on at room temperature but by increasing the alcohol content of the beer, we can make this natural solvent play on our side. That's the strategy that we employed for the Vénus Noire. I brew a somewhat strong oatmeal stout, left it to ferment for one week then transfered to the secondary fermenter, added cocoa nibs and vanilla, and gave it 15 days to condition. Daniel roasted a special batch for the occasion, Criollo beans from Peru, which my limited chocolate lexicon can only describe as very deep and somewhat reminiscent of a port wine. Daniel could tell you a lot more about these beans.

Everyone who tasted is really liked it. Chocolate aroma was very present; it's taste was subtle and well balanced with the roasted barley; oatmeal gave it a creamy texture and a heavy head. Pleased by all the positive comments, I decided to submit it to the brewing competition, where it faired very well: 2nd of nine entries in the stout category.

Original gravity was 1.069 and it got down to 1.017. Here's the complete recipe:

• 4.5 kg: Maris Otter malt
• 600 g: roaster barley
• 400 g: crystal 60L malt
• 500 g: oatmeal
• 500 g: white sugar (5 mins)
• 35 g: Chinook hops (12.4%, 35g for 60 mins)
• 50 g: Willamette hops (4.7%, 25g for 30 mins, 25 for 15)
• 1 vial: yeast (Dry English Ale, WLP 007)
• 137 g: Peruvian Criollo '08 cocoa nibs (secondary)
• 1/2 pod: vanilla (secondary)

Could it get better from there? Probably. I changed my thermometer since then and I tend to mash colder now, which allows me to reach a much lower final gravity. Avoiding residual sweetness would allow the vanilla to be more present. We could press the cocoa in order to extract the cocoa butter and to add non-oily solids as boil time. We could swap the Chinook for something that is more neutral. We could try that and dozens of other things. And this is the greatest aspect of homebrewing: we can improve a already impressive recipe, and we will.