Triple Chocolate Russian Imperial Stout

We’ve made a couple of stouts in our time, but we haven’t gone all out and brewed an Imperial Stout. We love chocolate and thought a Russian Imperial Stout is the perfect foundation for a big dose of it.

As with all good beers we created a solid malt base comprising of base pale, Medium Crystal, Light and Dark Chocolate and a touch of Cafara III. The wort was deliciously sweet with big chocolate notes and ended with a final gravity of over 23 plato.
Only bittering hops were used at the start of the boil. We had to be careful not to over bitter due to the cocoa astringencies to be used later in the process.

After weeks of researching and learning about chocolate with our friends from Red Cacao in the Adelaide Hills, we decided that raw cocoa powder was the best fit due to its smoothness and minimal fats from the cocao bean.

At the end of fermentation we made a chocolate sauce using a cocoa powder made from a heirloom variety of Criollo Amazonico (highest grade cacao), grown in the Amazon rainforest of Satipo, Peru. This was made using over 20kg of high-grade sugar, lots of vanilla beans and around 10kg of the cocoa powder. It wasn’t an easy task making the sauce in a 50lt keg on a burner, but we got there in the end.

Once made it had a fruity sweetness, a smokey character and was damn smooth and delicious! We injected this into the fermenter once it had cooled down the next day and waited for the yeast to ferment out the remaining sugars from the sauce.
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