Stout advice

Use a starter for sure. More than likely it will crap out if the yeast isn't healthy and in great numbers.

What's the OG?

 

Cold steep the coffee and add it, spices and the vanilla in at the very end of the process, before bottling, at that point you'll have a pretty good idea of the flavor profile of the finished product and can add coffee/vanilla to taste. As for everything else...I would add the oak, pepper, cacao nibs near the end of primary. Soak the cacao nibs, pepper and oak cubes in the bourbon for a few days to a week and then add the whole thing to the fermenter, bourbon and all. Or, you can strain off the bourbon and add just the oak, pepper and nibs but I would save the bourbon in case you want to add some bourbon flavor back in (and at that point the bourbon will have picked up the oak, cacao and pepper flavors). You will want to taste the beer every week or so to see where the flavors are at. How strong is this stout going to be, with all these additions, it will need a pretty strong backbone to hold all the flavors up.

 

If you are choosing on the cinnamon sticks be easy on them. I aged my imperial stout with 3 cinnamon sticks and it had a burn to it.
Cheers!

 

Everything AND the kitchen sink for your second AG? I wouldn't. If you want to make a base beer and split it up into growlers or gallon growlers, I'd push you in that direction. You can make 5 gallons of base stout with chocolate and coffee. After you get that where you want it, add peppers, cinnamon, vanilla, oak and whatever the hell else you want to each gallon thereafter. Feel free to blend the beers and play around with them.

 

For that OG its going to need to be a pretty good size. Also do you have a way to control your fermentation temperature? If not and your yeast cell count is too low you're going to have a crazy amount of fusel alcohol. My best advice for spices is that you can always add more, but you can't take them out. Also at 13%ABV you shouldn't really have to worry about infection at that time. You should just be able to wash the peppers and then put them in. The seeds are where the heat comes from and the flavor comes from the flesh of the pepper. As soon as you add your extras, make sure to taste it often to determine when you think its ready.

 

O2 first...flavor adjuncts later...good luck and cheers

 

For real? I think you need to read the KISS stout thread. Yeah, the one where I said I liked a little complexity in my stouts (read: two kinds of roasted malt and 1 type crystal). Obviously, I didn't know what I was talking about.

 

I'd give you stout advice, but I'm kinda tall and skinny, so that's out.

I agree with pweis, KISS it man. Pweis's stout recipe in the KISS stout thread is worth trying. I'd strongly consider doing that instead of trying to complicate things. Every time I complicate things I find a simple beer I've already made that came out better.

 

Definitely agree with the KISS approach especially in the beginning. Also agree with the split into smaller batches vs dump everything into one bucket.

But, if you can't control your fermentation temps, then even the base beer will likely suck and I can't imagine what the fusels plus all the other stuff would combine to taste like.

I also wonder if you can even get close to 1.108 for your 2nd all grain batch. Are you prepared to for a much lower effeciency vs. a "normal" beer? Do you have a mash tun that can hold that much grain? What about your brewpot? What was your 1st all grain batch? Sorry to sound so negative, but this sounds like an expensive mistake

 

Boy, this was my feeling as well. All these additions are good, and all of them can play great together, but even with years of brewing experience I would have some trepidation in terms of just adding them all in at once without being able to split/blend. It's really easy for any of these things to overwhelm.

If you are going to shoot for all of them in one secondary fermentation, the one thing I would caution is to maybe do them one at a time. The amount of pepper flavor added might not hit it where you want it to be as quickly as the cinnamon, but might be faster than the oak, etc. You might do one, wait until it hits the right flavor profile, remove and move on to the next ingredient, etc.

Coffee can definitely be added at the very end, as could vanilla if using extract. A little vanilla extract goes a loooong way.

On the peppers, I would just be mindful of whether you're looking simply for heat, or heat + smoke. A serrano and a chipotle pepper will provide two very different flavors.

 

I could be wrong, but I think he meant what was your efficiency on your first batch(es). You will likely get much worse efficiency due to the huge grain bill required unless you are able to sparge much more than usual (meaning you have a large pot and lots of patience for the extended boil required to boil off the extra liquid and hit your target O.G.). Take a pre-boil gravity reading to figure out how much you need to boil off.

My advice: oxygenate your wort when you pitch your huge yeast starter into it before putting your bucket/carboy equipped with blow off tube into your 60*F fermentation chamber. I also like the idea of adding one adjunct at a time after fermentation so you can pull the adjunct once the beer has extracted the desired flavor contribution from that particular adjunct.

 

Sorry my post wasn't helpful. Please forgive the tongue in cheek nature. I couldn't resist, but humor sometimes comes across as offensive online. I risked it and it failed. My more serious response is that I find it difficult to imagine all those components in a beer, making it difficult for me to suggest what else to add. It looks sort of like a mole with vanilla, or maybe a chocolate bar with chilies. I guess my constructive advice would be to make tinctures of all the things you hope to add and test them in scaled down proportions in a glass, figure what works, and scale up. Hope that is helpful.

 

BrewCipher has a calculator to predict your mash efficiency for any batch size, given your known recipe's/process's mash efficiency.

 

I'm not looking for a fight or argument or trying the piss in your cheerios You would be shocked at the number of new brewers who have posted similar threads and then ignore any and all advice only to come back and ask why their beer sucks. This is all supposed to be constructive criticism and thankfully there are very few assholes here in the homebrew forum.

So where were my questions coming from? You started out by saying nothing but this was you 2nd all grain batch and you were looking to throw the whole spice cabinet into the beer. My questions were specifically geared to helping you brew a better beer (as were all everyone else's). We now know that you have a way of controlling fermentation temps so you have that in your corner. We also know that you aren't planning on dumping in a metric shitload of peppers, vanilla, bourbon,...

Keep asking questions and you will be on your way to consistently making good/great beer

 

I'm with the 'traditionalist' camp 100% but will try to answer your questions from my initial years brewing with crazy shit.

1. Nothing, those flavors are enough. The more adjuncts you add, the more muddled they become and more probable that the combination will not work well. I'd say your 5 adjuncts sound like a good combo, stick with them.
2. I would rinse peppers and then spray with starsan before cutting and adding them in secondary. Your beer is going to be very high in alcohol, low pH, and low oxygen environment in secondary (hopefully), so risk of infection will be low.
3. http://thehotpepper.com/topic/35868-top-5-peppers-heat-vs-flavor/ ... Chocolate Habanero seems to be a winner.
4. Definitely need a starter. Fermentation makes or breaks beers. Make sure your pitching rate is correct, fermentation temp is good and stable, and that you aerate/oxygenate well.

P.S. I would keep the flavors all very subtle. I've found 0.4 oz of course ground coffee per gallon cold steeped in secondary or keg for 24 hrs gives a potent coffee character. Maybe go with 0.2 oz for 24 hrs to allow the other flavors to show themselves. For the other spices, look to Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher for dosages.

The key to perfecting a beer like this is keeping all the flavor adjuncts in balance and in a supporting but borderline lead role of the beer. The flavors they add should not be the main attraction, but they should be pushing the threshold to steal the show.

Like I said, I'm a traditionalist at heart, I'd prefer a glass of Pilsner Urquell over most anything like this sort, but to each their own. Hope some of this helps. Cheers.

 

brew the beer you like.

just be aware that the brewers that have responded to this thread have literally hundreds and probably thousands of brews under our collective belts. and we are all telling you to scale back on your third AG. it's not because we don't like you.

with all that, go for it. you will learn from the process. the biggest concern is that with so many things going on it will be impossible to make corrections to your process next time. this is a bit like making great eggs or world class pizza. it can take a lifetime of learning to get it just right and the best examples are usually not overly complex.

water grain hops yeast. there are thousands of possibilities. that is my advice.
Cheers.