Morning all,
Looking at branching out on this one for something a little distant from my norm, it is essentially my basic house recipe with some minor changes to bump up the gravity and give it a fuller mouthfeel that the last few and to use up a malt I've had kicking around for a little while. I have made a chocolate and vanilla porter before (which I ruined) and I have made a smoked porter before (which I didn't leave alone long enough) and I have wood aged a porter before for a couple of months.
I was contemplating fermenting in my wooden barrel but think this will entail a lot of work extracting the beer, holding it, washing and resterilising the cask and chucking the beer back in to condition, plus it will leave me short on volume as it will only hold 20L, some of which will be lost to trub and some will be absorbed into the wood, if I had a 30L oak barrel I'd certainly give it a try...but I don't.
The cocoa nibs will go into the cask for secondary as will the vanilla...or the vanilla will go into the keg with the finings added at the end prior to running some bottles off, unless I decide to bottle direct from the cask via the tap and a counter pressure filler. I am going with 6.25g/l for the cocoa nibs and somewhere between 1 and 1.5ml/l for the vanilla extract, I do have pods but I am not sure whether they are still sealed properly.
The base recipe is:
48% Maris Otter
20% Rauchmalt
12% Brown Malt
8% Ragus No. 3
7% Dark Crystal
5% Carafa I
Hops will be Challenger and Styrian Goldings to 30 IBU, colour should be somewhere around 60+ EBC.
Has anyone done anything similar or think it won't work, this is by far my most experimental beer so any words of wisdom would be appreciated.
Cheers.