Has anyone attempted a clone of Westbrook Mexican Cake? I LOVE this beer, and I want to make it. If you've had success, please share your recipe.
look up a Stone Russian Imperial Stout clone, then age it with vanilla bean, coca nibs, and a cinnamon stick. i think there is a pepper in there too, its on the label. just got a bottle of mex cake gonna try it this weekend, and im aging a stout right now thats modeled after it aswell
Yup, it's habaneros. Stone IRS actually sounds like a pretty decent starting point flavor wise. IRS is 10.6% and 60 IBUs while MC is 10.5% and 50 IBUs.
Had Mexican Cake for the first time yesterday - very tasty beer. One thing I'll add is that it had a huge underlying chocolate component. Much bigger than any I can recall from drinking Stone RIS but it has been quite a while since I had a Stone RIS. Also, unless the flavor additions just masked it, the roast component seemed lower than my weak recollection of Stone RIS.
@InVinoVeritas i was only aging the RIS with vanilla and cocoa. But thank you for bringing this post back to my attention, i was just thinking of something to brew over the weekend, and it looks like this will be my next brew on the docket!
If anyone is still interested try this. It’s worked perfectly 3 times now. 5 gallon batch 13lbs maris otter 2 lbs biscuit 1 lb flaked oats 8 oz roasted barley 8 oz chocolate malt 4 oz black barley 4 oz dark crystal 12 oz blackprinz 2 lbs dark candi sugar and 1lb d-90 syrup ( corn sugar can be used to replace the candi sugar) 2 oz Columbus @60 min 2 packs of wlp090 San Diego Super yeast 4 liter starter at least 36 hours before I added another 1 lb of corn sugar after two days of fermentation. Mash at 150-152 for 90 min Collect 7.5 gallons preboil Boil 60 min in converted 15 gallon keg for a 5.5 gallon. OG 1.110 FG 1.022 4 oz cocoa nibs 8 vanilla beans ($5 a bean at Kroger) 4 cinnamon sticks 4 habanero peppers quartered. Remove stems. Let sit on spices for 5 days rack to carboy. Add clearing agent. Wait 24 hrs rack to keg. Co2 @ 30psi for 3 days. Drop to 7 psi to serve. Good luck!
Thanks for sharing and happy to see you've had good luck with this recipe. Is it from scratch or is the grain bill from another recipe? Also, have you done a side by side with the commercial beer?
8 vanilla beans? That sounds like a lot. I have brewed a beer with that many flavor additions so maybe that’s what is needed to come through but 8 seems like a lot.
This recipe was just a big stout and flavored with the appropriate spices. Numbers and temp are close to what Westbrook used. I’ve changed amounts basted on what I taste. Here is an email from Westbrook sent to an individual and posted on another forum. This is not my email. This was simply copied and pasted for you guys to see. “For reasons that I hope are apparent, I won't go into details regarding much of this, but I will give you some guidance. Malt bill isn't too crazy: you can go with a basic big stout malt bill (something with Chocolate, Dark/ExtraDark Crystal) bill and adjust it for ~10.5%. We do add a little bit of flaked oats to give it a slightly creamier mouth-feel. We also add Dextrose and Dark Belgian Candi Syrup (end of boil/whirlpool) to help get us enough sugar to hit 10.5%. Target OG: 1.1034 and Target FG: 1.0233. We use basic CTZ (Columbus, Tomahawk, and/or Zeus) hopping for bitterness (60 minutes). No further hop additions. We use our house english ale yeast. Again, nothing too special here. Mash Water at 172 F shooting for 150 F at rest. Regarding Adjuncts: We add all of the adjuncts to our bright tanks so I would recommend adding to your secondary for 3-5 days. Ratio wise, you will probably want to shoot for something like 1 : 5 : 10 : 15 (ground cinnamon : vanilla bean : habanero : cocoa nibs). The exact quantities don't scale to a homebrew size well (it's not very linear, and you will probably need a higher #/gal than we do). The habanero and cinnamon can be blended together using a blender or food processor. The vanilla bean can be chopped into bits, but leave the cocoa nibs whole. The biggest problem comes with the habaneros though. The amount of heat they provide can vary wildly from crop to crop. We usually end up adding more habaneros after a couple days to try to get the heat where we want it and sometimes have to do this multiple times. They are very tricky to work with. I hope you find this helpful,“
IMO, 8 beans for 5 days in 5 gallons is going to be undrinkable, unless these Kroger beans are extremely weak.
Just add less beans then. I added 4 the first time and it didn’t seem to be enough .So I added 8 beans. Now I like it.
