Coming Soon: Chocolate Orange Stout!

It's almost that time again!  Yep, time for stores to bring out all their Halloween stuff.  Well, if you check out craft stores, you'll probably see them starting to bring out all their Christmas stuff, too.  WTF??  WHY???  Well, simple: those crafts often take months to complete, so starting in the Summer or early Fall is the only way they can guarantee to complete in time to gift or decorate by Thanksgiving (or shortly after).

With beer, it's much the same thing.  Even the simplest brews usually take at least a month to properly prepare, so those easy-drinking summer ales need to be brewed late Spring, and naturally, Fall and Winter brews need to start in the Summer and early Fall.  Some big beers can take several months to mature.  Even if they're not mead or barleywines designed to age for years, many stouts, porters, and Belgians often need an extra month or three for the flavors to meld, and for any esters or diacetyl flavors to clean up, so it's important to plan these things a few months in advance.

Dude... THIS!  but in a beer!  *mind blown*

This year's Christmas Beer will be a Chocolate Orange Stout.  I'll be doing another collaborative brew, like with The GRAPH, but this time the recipe will be a bit more organized.  Planning to brew the last weekend of August, for an expected bottling mid-October.  Beer should be ready to drink mid-late November, meaning plenty should be around for Christmas!

At first, I was planning on revisiting What's This?, the Christmas beer I made about 6-7 years ago that turned out pretty delicious, but I talked it over with some friends who will help brewing, and we decided a chocolate orange would be more fun.  Who doesn't like those chocolate oranges?  You know, the British ones that only show up around Christmas and need to be smacked on the counter to break them apart.

I've been able to find a ton of chocolate stouts and porters that are pretty well tried and true -- even some peanut butter chocolate ones -- so it should be pretty easy to get a deep, in-your-face chocolate flavor.  Most likely, it'll involve some low-temp mashed chocolate malts, with cocoa nibs added close to flameout.

What's been more difficult is finding recipes for a chocolate orange stout.  Searches have turned up several people asking how to make one, but very few actually described their experience or best practices.  DoubleDach did one here, about 10 years ago, and gave some lessons learned that have so far been very inspirational, but I've found very few other posts describing the process, or how it turned out.  The biggest thing I've learned is that some people think 3oz of dried orange peels for 5 gallons is far too much, but others don't think it's near enough.  The final verdict seems to be to start small, but make more extract than you plan to use (I'm going to use zest from clementines and put them in some liquor instead of buying pre-packaged dried orange peel).  If the orange flavor isn't forward enough, I can always add more at bottling, until it tastes right.  Assuming the beer fermented long enough, there should be relatively few changes in the overall flavor due to bottling.

The goal here is to make a beer that is very forward in chocolate, with a strong orange undertone, while avoiding tasting syrupy or excessively sweet.  It'll be a dessert beer that you sip slowly, rather than chug a six pack.

Finally, I'm also seriously considering brewing a quick light ale at the same time - maybe an Oktoberfest-adjacent Amber or something lighter - that should be ready by the time we bottle the chocolate orange.  It'll most likely miss actual Oktoberfest (Sep 21 - Oct 6 this year), but maybe I'll plan better next year.  This would be something small and inexpensive that can produce enough beer to tide us over until the chocolate orange stout is ready, since it's unlikely my two gallons of Darkseid will last that long.