We love coffee and we love stout, so it only made sense to combine them both in this delicious and creamy nitro infused beer. Other than the fire we built to keep ourselves warm while brewing, the brew day was pretty typical as far as stout home brewing goes. Anyway, let's just get into the details. Here's how we mad our nitro cold brew coffee stout.
How to Brew Nitro Coffee Stout
This recipe is for a 5 gallon batch and is optimized for Clawhammer Supply's 10 gallon electric BIAB system, watch us use it in the video below. For full recipe details, keep scrolling.
Nitro Coffee Stout Homebrew Recipe
Water
We added 7.28 gallons of water to start and indiscriminately tossed in some gypsum in an effort to drop our PH into the correct range. We were shooting for something in the range of 5.2 to 5.4.
Grains and Mash
We mashed the following ingredients at 148F for 60 minutes:
5 lbs. 5 oz. of Maris Otter Pale Malt
2 lbs. 2 oz. of Munich Malt
1 lbs. Victory Malt
1 lbs Chocolate Malt
8.5 oz. Crystal 40 Malt
8.5 oz. Dark Wheat Malt.
Boil and Hops
After the mash we pulled our grain basket and let it drain for about 10 minutes while the sweet wort was heating up to a boil. After it reached a boil we set timer for 60 minutes and immediately added 1.5 ounces of Fuggle Hops for bittering. At the end of our 60 minute boil we added an additional 0.5 ounces of Fuggle hops for some subtle aroma.
Fermentation
After the boil we cooled our brew down to 70F and added London Ale (WLP013) yeast from White Labs. We let this beer sit for about a week and a half before we kegged it.
Kegging and Coffee Addition
Interestingly enough, coffee doesn't get added (or at least we didn't add it) until the beer is kegged. This allows the beer to remain maximum coffee flavor and aroma (in our opinion) as yeast tends to change the flavor profile of stuff in beer as it chews through the sugars and other compounds.
We added 6 ounces of cold brew espresso concentrate. Add 12 ounces if you aren't using concentrate.
Nitrogen
We served this beer on nitro for maximum creamy awesomeness. Specifically, we used a 25/75 carbon dioxide / nitrogen blend. This allows the beer to retain a bit of the body that CO2 gas provides after the nitrogen bubbles have left suspension and are sitting on top of the beer in the form of a creamy head.
To learn how to serve beer on nitro at home, check out this article.
Tasting and Conclusion
The beer tasted exactly how we wanted it to. Roasty, toasty, creamy, smooth, and delicious. Chocolate and of course coffee were the primary flavors we picked up. The great thing about this beer is that since coffee is added after the beer is completely finished, more can be added at any time if you want to up the coffee flavor. We 100% recommend that you try this recipe if you're interested in brewing a nitro coffee stout.
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