Bumping Up a Chocolate Milk Stout

what abv does the kit yield?

 

Honey will give you a lot of flavors and aromas, but if you're looking for sweetness, it might be better to use some non-fermentable sugars/syrups. Honey is 90-95% fermentable, so you might need to use a lot to get the level of sweetness you are looking for.

 

You could use an insane (impractical/impossible) amount of honey without adding sweetness. For practical purposes, the sugars in honey can be considered virtually 100% fermentable. The stuff in honey that's not fermentable (mostly water, but also a bunch of other compounds) doesn't add sweetness.

I suspect the 95% number you are quoting is the sugar percentage of the total dry weight of honey.

 

Welcome to the BA site, Johnny, and to the Homebrewing forum.

Any honey that is added will ferment out and dry out your beer, so that's giving you the opposite effect of what you want. You may get some honey flavor, but that will depend on how much is added.

Fermentation in the primary only depends on when the yeast are done, not on a calendar. Recipes in kits typically give a time period as a guideline, but only a hydrometer will tell you when fermentation is complete.

The common practice nowadays (regardless of what your instructions may say) for using a secondary is only to use one if aging a beer on fruit, oak chips, or just aging a high ABV beer while it conditions, or for a lager while it lagers. Racking needlessly to a secondary just adds the possibility of introducing oxygen into your beer, which is close to the worst thing that you can do to your new beer.

I have not tried to sweeten a beer to know the answer to your question, but I believe that I've read in this forum that maltose is the way to go. Hopefully someone else can chime in to confirm that choice, and for how much to add.

 

That's a good question, but I suspect that honey also contains "some" non-fermentable sugars. I've tried to make dry mead before, but there always seems to be some level of sweetness remaining - whether actual or perceptual.

 

I think you might mean maltodextrin, which is unfermentable, and just slightly sweet. (Maltose is the most common sugar in beer wort, but is fermentable.)

But for a Milk Stout, I'd recommend more Lactose if OP wants a sweeter stout. It won't do anything for ABV, but simply adding fermentables to a kit to hit 10% ABV sounds like a bad idea to me.

 

There you go, @Johnny2Science. VikeMan always knows the answer.

 

Lactose is the traditional sweetener for a milk stout (but also to give it a milky smoothness), but something like Xylitol could also work if only extra sweetness is desired.

 

According to the following:
https://byo.com/mead/item/322-brewing-with-honey
Honey "contains roughly 80 percent sugars, mostly glucose and fructose (with some other sugars and complex carbohydrates thrown in), 17.5 percent water, proteins and amino acids, trace amounts of vitamins and minerals, anti-oxidants and enzymes".

Also, the article says that 95% of the carbohydrates are fermentable. Thus there is still 5% of the carbohydrates that are not fermentable, and this 5% is part of the 80% of sugars, so that is about 4% of the total.

 

Check your (or the article's) logic here. All sugars are carbohydrates. Not all carbohydrates are sugars.

 

I agree and was aware of that, but without a further breakdown, it does gives an approximate value. What I should more specifically have said was that "no more than about 4% of the total is non-fermentable sugars".

 

Does the base recipe have lactose already? Usually milk stouts already have lactose.
Also, have you brewed this beer already? If not, brew it as it is and make adjustments next time.

 

You're reading more into it than I am. Once you get past his use of the word sugars where he should have said carbs, here's what he's saying...

- Honey is 80% carbs
- 95% of those carbs are fermentable

There is no way to tell from that information how much of the actual sugars are fermentable. It does place an upper limit on percentage of sugars that are unfermentable, but not a lower limit (other than 0). So 0-5%.

BTW, that's a pretty old article. There was a better (IMO) BYO article on brewing with honey in (IIRC) 2012. But I don't think that one is on line.

 

Yes, it was in the March-April issue, and written by Mick Spencer.

 

Adding honey will increase the ABV with any yeast strain, as long as you weren't already on the border of that strain's ABV tolerance.

If I wanted to turn a small stout into a big stout, I'd increase that base malts/extracts and (to a slightly lesser extent) the specialty malts/extracts. And add more bittering hops to balance.

 

Use more DME to get more ABV.

 

More malt, or honey...I would shoot for 7.5 percent or slightly lower for a smoother drinkable beer. Honey will dry it out nicely...but a dry 10 percent ABV could come across as harsh, or perhaps perfectly drinkable. The only thing left to do is wait and be patient. Honey is not exactly a slow fermenter as some exaggerate, but it does take time.