Tasting the experimental brew.

Grandmas Chocolate Cherry Stout (draft)
It poured a dark black liquid with a small foam that left some lacing.

It smelled sour and sweet with chocolate.

It tasted very sour with an aftertaste of chocolate and something burned, like burned toast. It was way to sour for a stout and not very nice if you see it that way. However if you consider it a sour beer then it tasted allot better. So the below score is for a sour beer.
Total: 2,1/5

Grandmas Chocolate Cherry Porter (draft)
It poured a dark brown liquid with a small brown foam (bigger than the stout).

It smelled sweet with some milk chocolate.

It didn’t taste as sour as the stout and had more chocolate taste, that leaned more towards milk chocolate then the stout. But it also had a chemical bitterness to it that wasn’t that pleasant.
Total: 2,3/5

Conclusions:
All in all the beers where way to sour for a stout or porter. But not in a bad way, they hadn’t gone bad or anything. It was just too much cherries in the beer. But it didn’t taste like cherries, the sourness was too high to distinguish much else. So what we need to do is use a smaller quantity of cherries in the next brew. I also heard that we could add some laktos to balance the sourness up a bit and let the cherry flavor break free.

The question on how to add the cherries is a bit harder. I think both methods work. We’ll have to mull it over a bit more.

Regarding the chocolate I think the stout was closer to the aim then the porter. But I think we need to be somewhere in between to reach the level we are aiming for.

Experimental brewed revealed!

A while back me, Chrille and my father started experimenting on a brew that we plan to participate with at the Swedish Championship in Homemade beer. Last Thursday it was finally time to taste it and evaluate.

Now to be able to write a review of the beer I will have to tell you what we have been attempting to make. I’ve been keeping it a secret up until now, just for the fun of it. I will start by telling about how the idea for the brew came to be.

A couple of years ago I went to Akkurat with two Danish friends. We got a tip to try their chocolate truffles with some kriek (cherry beer). Now I have always loved both chocolate and kriek so I thought it sounded great and ordered it in. Both the kriek and the chocolate were nice on their own, but once you mixed the two it just enhanced the flavor of both of them. The kriek complimented the truffles and the truffles complimented the kriek. After this I kept ordering truffles and kriek every time I visited a pub that had it.

Even before we started making our own beer I and my father had been discussing what beer would be fun to participate in the different festivals. Fairly soon I thought it would be fun to try to mix cherries and chocolate in a brew. So the idea for the chocolate cherry stout (or porter) was born.

At first we thought it was a fresh idea but after some research we realized that some Americans had already tried it and I bet a bunch of homebrewers have already made it. However we couldn’t really find any details on how to actually make the beer. Since we are both rookies when it comes to brewing beer we brought Chrille on board, partly because he is a great guy and also because he knows the basics around brewing allot better than me and my father. He has created the recipes we have used while brewing, I’ve been responsible for a large part of the idea work and my father has done allot of the technical work, gathering the equipment and making it work. All in all it’s been a great team effort and I hope something good comes out of it. If nothing else at least we got some male bonding ;)

I’ve always found it hard to describe what the aim of the beer is. But basically I want it to be a complex stout or porter where the cherries and chocolate are seasoning and not the base of the beer. In other words we are not aiming for a fruit beer like a kriek or a chocolate drink that kids drink for breakfast.

The first problem we encountered was how we were going to get the cherry flavor into the beer and at what quantity. We got the cherries from my grandmother that has a cherry tree on their yard. For the stout we added the cherries during the cooking. For the porter we added allot more chocolate and then added the cherries during the fermentation. We also added different quantities of chilli and honey.

In my next article I’m going to review the beer and try to find what we can do to make it better.