'Coffee' Stout

About

This Milk Stout is our first dark beer and is a great choice if you are looking for something completely different.

It gets its characteristic stout colour from an imported dark roast malt which also imparts a slight nutty and creamy coffee taste to the beer. This combines with the fuller, creamier taste of lactose sugar to give you a cold-cappuccino-of-a-beer. There is, however, no coffee in the recipe. Just the main ingredients of beer: grain, hops, yeast and water.

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Suggested Variations

Dark beers lend themselves well to experimenting with additional flavours. While it may upset some purists, this spirit of adventure is what gave rise to the incredible variety we love in craft beer. Our 'Coffee' Stout gives you a rich and distinct base to work from. You can use it to make the beer you really want to drink.

Here are two suggestions that we enjoy, but feel free to pick and choose for yourself. Or choose not to - you're crafting your own beer after all.

Vanilla Bourbon Stout

Some breweries will age their stouts in whiskey casks to impart smokey or wooded tastes. Some distilleries are also experimenting with using these beer casks to age their whiskey and bourbon. If you're intrigued by this, you can join in on these flavours by adding 100ml of Jack Daniels just before you bottle (mix it in with the priming sugar). Half a teaspoon (2.5ml) of vanilla essence also works really well with this.

Chocolate Stout

A dark chocolate beer is really something to behold. It will open your eyes to what is possible.

Bakers will often add a little coffee to their chocolate desserts to accentuate the coca flavours. Seeing as our kit is a 'Coffee' Stout, it makes a great base to experiment with making your own dark chocolate beer. Most chocolate flavourings are either poorly soluble in water or overly bitter, but an easy solution is to mix in 40g of Nesquik chocolate milk flavoring powder just before bottling. If you choose this option, leave out the Priming Sugar as Nesquik already contains sugar

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What's in the Kit

Short answer: everything you need to make your own beer that you don't already have in your kitchen. For the items you need from your kitchen, check the top of the recipe page.
The rest of this page has the long answer.

Specific to 'Coffee' Stout

Dutch Coffee Malt

Speciality malts are typically added in small amounts relative to the base malt of any beer (pale malt in the case of this kit). A little more than a twelfth of the grain in this kit is a dark roasted coffee malt from the BlackSwaen range made by Dutch malting house The Swaen. Despite this small quantity, it completely changes the colour of the beer to a deep brown, bordering on black, colour

In addition to the soft bitter and burnt hints you might expect from dark beers, this malt imparts a slight nutty and creamy coffee taste to the beer. This creates our favourite stout recipe - which are proud to be able to share with you. This isnt just the stout you get in your local Irish pub. The addition of this malt makes it something even more special.

All our grain is freshly milled just before shipping to help you make the best beer possible. Your Coffee Malt will be delivered already mixed in with your Pale Malt and Flaked Corn

German Caramel Malt

The Coffee Malt is complemented by an imported drum-roasted caramel malt made from quality spring 2-row barley. This second speciality grain contributes a gentle malty sweetness that that offsets the sharp flavours of the dark roast of the other specialty malt. The subtle caramel flavour also evokes the tastes synonymous with a good cup of fresh-roasted coffee.

All our grain is freshly milled just before shipping to help you make the best beer possible. Your Speciality Malt will be delivered already mixed in with your Pale Malt and Flaked Corn

Blended South African Hops (Purple Dot)

Our stout contains a blend of three locally grown bittering hops that is used by a large local brewery. The blend creates a neutral yet complex flavour that works well in this dark beer.

This hops is packaged with a purple dot on the bag.

Lactose

Lactose is a non-fermentable sugar derived from milk. It's what puts the 'Milk' in Milk Stout. The brewer's yeast is unable to consume lactose, so this sugar lends a little sweetness to the beer that is absent in most other beers. It is only about a fourth as sweet as regular sugar though.

In addition to sweetness, lactose also improves the body of the beer by adding a full and almost creamy taste. This works incredibly well with the coffee tastes of the malt

When your kit arrives, the small bag of white powder is dextrose priming sugar while the large bag is the lactose. It doesnt matter too much though as you add both to you beer at the same time.

Flaked Corn

Flaked corn is included in our recipe as an Adjunct Grain. It makes up a similar weight to the Speciality Malt to further give your beer a full body and mouth feel. "But corn in my beer?" we hear you ask. Next time you are in the store, you'd be surprised how many commercial beers include 'maize' on their list of ingredients. This adjunct grain is commonly used in Ales as well as American Lagers

Your Flaked corn will arrive pre-milled and mixed in with your Pale and Speciality Malt

In All Kits

All of our 4L Kits contain the following items

Pale Malt

Pale malted barley makes up the majority of most Craft Beers. Our Pale Malt is locally grown and malted by South Africa's very own SAB Maltings. Malting is the a process whereby raw barley is prepared for beer making by starting its germination process to break down proteins and foster enzymes. These enzymes will help convert starches into fermentable sugars that will ultimately put the alcohol in your beer.

This choice of Pale Malt wil give you a beer that you're already very familiar with. All our grain is freshly milled just before shipping to help you make the best beer possible

Brewer's Yeast

Our kits contain a specially engineered brewing yeast that is guaranteed to make a far better beer than that baker's stuff you get at the supermarket.
In more technical terms, our choice of yeast has a high 'attenuation'. This means that it's able to covert most of the sugars into alcohol giving you that 'dry' taste you expect from beer. It has a low 'ester production', so it doesnt make those weird banana/bubblegum flavours. It also has good flocculation, which means that it doesnt remain suspended in your beer after fermentation thus giving you a clearer beer.

Priming Sugar

No one wants to drink flat beer. We include a carefully measured amount of dextrose priming sugar to add to your beer just before bottling. This additional priming sugar with continue to ferment in the sealed bottles for a couple of days, releasing CO2 and naturally self-carbonating your beer without making an explosive mess on your ceiling :)

Dextrose is chosen as it is highly 'bio-available' resulting in fast natural carbonation without altering the taste of your beer

No-rinse Sanitizer

The most important part of making your own beer is keeping out any microbes or wild yeast. This ensures that all of the fermentable sugars are consumed by your brewers yeast and not something else that will produce 'off flavours'. As long as you keep everything sterile, you'll make good beer.

To help with this, we include a 50ml sachet of a concentrated, SABS Approved, no-rinse sanitizer that is specially formulated for the food industry to not leave a residue once it dries. This is the 'purple' sachet pictured to the right. If you still have an older kit with a bottle of clear sanitizer, see the [Show More] block below.

You will need sanitizer on both Brew Day and Bottling Day. The new sachets of sanitizer are very stable, so either you can mix half the concentrate on either day (storing the open sachet in a sealed container in between) or you can even mix the full amount and store the diluted mixture to use both days. We recommend the first option. The 50ml sachet should be diluted with 10L to 20L of water (10L as described on the packaging, is for 'soiled surfaces', so given that everything is already clean when your are brewing, you can mix up to 20L is it is easier for you)

Beeswax

During the mashing step of brewing, you need to achieve very specific temperatures in order to facilitate the enzymes in the malt converting starch into fermentable sugars.

Our kit leverages an ancient brewing technique that relies on the fact that beeswax melts around this perfect temperature. We thus include a couple of beeswax pellets to help you hit the right temperature. Of course if you have access to a good thermometer you can use that too - albeit with less 'craft'. You also have twice as many pellets as you need, in case you mess up.

Tube (Airlock and Siphon)

We include a length of tube in the kit that fulfills two purposes.

For the first case, fermentation produces a lot of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) gas. You want to let this CO2 out of the fermentor while not letting any oxygen in. Yeast needs to respire anaerobically (i.e. without oxygen) to produce alcohol. Our solution is to insert the one end of the tube into the hole in the top of the fermentor and put the other end in a glass of water to create a one-way airlock

In the second case, you want to gently transfer your beer into your bottles without introducing air into it. This is needed in order to keep your beer fresh. You can use this same tube to siphon the beer out of fermentor without creating any bubbles

5L Fermentor

This is the bucket for your grain!

Our kit is shipped in a 5 litre food-safe bucket that can be used to ferment your beer. It has a hole in the lid to insert your airlock

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