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The Young's Double Chocolate Stout clone recipe I'm about to rack to the secondary in two days calls for 0.33 ounces of chocolate extract. That's less than a tablespoon. The bottle of chocolate extract I got from the brew supply shop says to use 4-5 ounces per 5 gallons. That's quite a bit of difference.

My recipe also has 13 oz. of British chocolate malt and 6 ounces of this dark cocoa powder. That's a lot of chocolate, so I'm pretty sure I don't want the full four ounces of chocolate extract. However, I'm concerned that 0.33 ounces in the secondary won't have any impact.

Has anyone used this chocolate extract? Did you feel you used too little or too much?

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  • Chocolate extract is just about the only form of chocolate i didn't put in my stout. I used Bakers chocolate in the boil and added cocoa into my secondary. Wasn't able to find chocolate extract in time. If it were me, I'd go with more than less, but I was making a double chocolate stout.
    – tbeseda
    Jan 12, 2010 at 17:46
  • I'm making double chocolate stout, too. I'm thinking I'll go with 2 ounces for the batch. The only problem is if it's too chocolatey, I'll have a hard time knowing if it's too much extract, too much cocoa, or too much chocolate malt. If only I had two secondaries as suggested by PJ.
    – JackSmith
    Jan 12, 2010 at 17:55

3 Answers 3

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I have used the entire 8oz tin of herseys dark cocao powder in a porter before and it turned out great.

I would hold the extract for bottling. Transfer your finished beer to your bottling bucket and taste a little. Add some extract until you get it to where you want it. Then add your priming sugar and off you go.

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  • Good suggestion, but if I did this, wouldn't I have to stir the beer in the bottling bucket after each addition, possibly oxidizing the beer? Also, I don't know if it would get mixed in as well as if I added the extract to the bucket before siphoning the beer into it.
    – JackSmith
    Jan 12, 2010 at 17:58
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    If done carefully you won't get as much oxidation as you think. And the small but of yeast activty during priming will suck up some of the O2. Alternatively, you can pour a pint or half a pint and add the extract dropwise until its where you want it. Then you can just do the math to scale up to the full 5 gallons. That way you can siphon on top of the extract rather than have to stir.
    – brewchez
    Jan 12, 2010 at 20:04
  • I think we have a winner. Though, I think this beer will be better 6 months out than it will after even a month in the secondary and a few weeks in the bottle. It's going to try my patience. :)
    – JackSmith
    Jan 22, 2010 at 21:02
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I've never used chocolate extract. Taylor might be able to help better with that, as he just used real chocolate in a batch.

Do you have the equipment to have two secondaries? You could test the ratio for future batches, putting .16 oz in one, and 2 oz in the other.

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  • Now I wish I had two 2.5 gallon secondaries...
    – JackSmith
    Jan 12, 2010 at 17:53
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I've had good luck with a very good quality Belgium cocoa. You don't need much, I did a recipe with 1 oz and it turned out better than using 8 oz of your standard grocery store cocoa.

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