Black Forest Stout Review

So...... Long time no post? Yes, yes indeed. The holidays have made me busy, and reduced my brewing activity, though not my drinking (and eating) activity, so much so that I went on a beer diet for a week.

Anyway, after a bit of a hiatus from posting here, I'm back with this review of my Black Forest Stout. 
Aroma: Hard to describe. To me it doesn't scream chocolate or cherry; you kind of have to pay close attention to find them in there. But I do get some dark chocolate notes and fruity cherry notes. I think the chocolate is more noticeable in the aroma.

Taste: I would say the acid / sourness and fruityness of the cherries dominate here. The acidity especially, as there seems to be little sweetness, or perhaps what sweetness there is has been dominated by the cherry / sour flavors. There's some bitter, unsweetened chocolate in there too, which is detectable but again you kind of have to search for it. The roasty or acrid character of a stout, to my pallet, does not really make an appearance.

Mouthfeel: Surprisingly, pretty thick and creamy, with low carbonation. A kind of weird, sour and chocolatey aftertaste.

Overall: It's drinkable and good, with a cherry kick, but not in balance and not chocolatey enough. My experience with fruit so far has been that it reduces the sweetness of the beer by adding a lot of unfermentable sugars and acidity, which causes the perceived sourness to increase. For this one, I would need to find some way to make it more chocolatey and better balanced with the cherry flavor. And, given the acidity of the cherries and the bitterness of unsweetened chocolate, it probably ought to be sweeter, just like a Black Forest Cake would be.

Black Forest Stout Brewday

At the request of my wife, I brewed a chocolate stout. At the request of myself, I'll be adding cherries. This recipe is a scaled version of the Black Forest Stout recipe from Brewing Classic Styles. It's supposed to be like the cake - chocolatey, sweet, cherry flavors. In other words, a desert beer.

Black Forest Stout
8.5# British Pal Ale Malt
8oz Roasted Barley
6oz Crystal 40
6oz Crystal 80
5oz Chocolate Malt

5oz Unsweetened Cocoa Powder, added during the last 5 min of the boil
3# Cherry Puree, added after fermentation has slowed

.25oz Warrior, 13.7%, 60min
.50oz Chinook, 11%, 60min

Danstar Nottingham

Expected FG / OG / IBUs / ABV: 1.066 / 1.013 / 35 / 6.9$
(Not sure if my software, BrewTarget, considers the effects of the Cherry Puree, which will raise the OG and the ABV.)

Brewed 11/10/13, with a buddy from the local brewing club

Hit my mash temps just fine.

Stuck sparge! Crap. I think that the grains were crushed quite a bit too finely. To deal with it, I added all the sparge water at once, scooped the mash into my 8gallon kettle, and heated up to sparge temps. Then scooped it back into the MLT with the valve open. I also put some of the grain into a colander over a bucket, and it slowly drained some beer into the bucket. Probably this all resulted in reduced efficiency and some extra trub material in the kettle. Not a disaster, but close, I would say.

Got about 4 gallons of wort, pre-boil.

Didn't take gravity readings before the boil, but when 15mins was left I had about 1.060, so surprisingly not bad efficiency.

Added the chocolate late in the boil. It made the beer look like boiling chocolate syrup. Dark, thick, chocolatey.

Cooled to about 110F, then let the kettle sit in the garage for a while, which by that time was around 60F. Pitched later, when the wort was about at 70F. I rehydrated the yeast this time.

11/11/13, 10:30am. The beer was bubbling slowly.

11/12/13, 6pm. Fermentation very active. The beer looks like chocolate milk.

11/13/13, 6pm. Fermentation is now quite slow in terms of airlock activity.

11/19/13, put the cherry puree into a plastic fermenting bucket and racked the beer on top of it, getting some chocolate sludge in there as well.

12/3/13, bottled, going for 2.25 units of CO2. The beer tasted of chocolate but not a whole lot of cherry. I'll try it in a week or so, assuming that the 60F in the basement is warm enough for yeast activity. There appeared to be a bit of chocolate sludge in each bottle.