brew #007: failed romance chocolate cherry stout

Immediately after cranking out #006 Solanka Stout I decided it would be cool to do one more big fruity beer on my Wyeast Irish Ale yeast cake. The original plan was to do chocolate raspberry but prices at my grocery store moved me over to the equally appealing cherry. I bought two pounds of fresh cherries (I don’t know the type, just plain ‘ol cherries), destemed and then froze them to weaken the skin to allow for maximum fruit-goodness extraction. The cherries seeped after the boil from 180F to 150F for approximately 15 minutes before the chiller water was cranked up again. After cooling, the entire mess – whole cherries and all – went into the primary.
The name from my first fruit beer comes from my assistant Brian and his lovely girlfriend Carolyn. OH…wait…not because they have failed but because they helped and got to name it with me. This is my first real fruit beer and I am excited to see how it plays with the fruity/spicy character of the yeast as well as that half pound of real chocolate I threw in!
One other note: the hop additions are funky due to some confusion during the boil. SOMEBODY handed me the wrong unmarked hop addition (ok…partly my fault) so to make up for bitterness some quick calculations and additions were done. No harm, no foul!


Ingredients
3.00 lb Light Dry Extract (8.0 SRM) 32.6 %
3.30 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) 35.9
1.00 lb Caramel 80 (80 SRM) 10.9 %
0.50 lb Chocolate Pre (350.0 SRM) 5.4 %
0.30 lb Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM) 3.3 %
0.20 lb Black Patent Malt (500.0 SRM) 2.2 %
0.10 lb Carapils (2.0 SRM) 1.1 %
0.80 lb Corn Syrup with Vanilla (1.0 SRM) 8.7 %

0.30 oz Magnum [14.40%] (60 min) 15.6 IBU
0.30 oz Magnum [14.40%] (40 min) 13.7 IBU
0.25 oz Magnum [14.40%] (25 min) 9.1 IBU

0.5 lb Semisweet Bakers Chocolate (60 min)
2.0 lb Cherries, frozen (10 steep after flameout at 180F)
Irish Ale (Wyeast Labs #1084)


The Brew
Soundtrack: All Time Low, Motion City Soundtrack
Brew Beer: Pale Ginger Kids Ale, Bad Bad Brown Ale


Stats
Fermentation: 5 days in primary at 68F, 7 days in secondary at 68F, 1 days at 50F
Original Gravity: 1.058
Final Gravity: 1.015
Est. ABV: ~5.6%
IBU: 39 [Tinseth]
Color: 35 SRM
Brewed: 8/6/09
3.5 gallons bottled: 8/18/09
1 gallon put on 1 oz oak chips for 5 days (why not!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 9:25 pm and is filed under brew stats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.