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Greetings all!

I haven't been on here in a while but I know I can rely on you guys for all my brewing needs!

Trying my hand at a nice coffee stout for this festive season but alas, I do not know what ratios to use for putting coffee into my secondary. I have read everything from 0.5oz per gallon to 1cup per gallon but never any mention of water:coffee ratios.

I don't want coffee forward beer but I don't want someone to search for the coffee taste either. I know cold brewing coffee for 12-24 hours is best to reduce acidity levels in the coffee and therefore reduce bitterness. But that's about the end of it.

Looking to do secondary in the next couple days. So any help I would love guys!

I'd go the cold brew route and add it in increments until you find what tastes right to you. Should be fairly straight forward taking samples from the secondary

I cold brewed (24 hours in my french press) 1 cup good coffee (I used a blonde espresso) per 3 cups of quality water. you end up with 2 cups of finished coffee. I added the 2 cups of finished coffee at kegging. Added a noticeable coffee note, perfect for what I was going for.

you could cut that back to 1/4 cup coffee per 1 cup water if you wanted to back off the coffee

For my coffee stout, I fill a French press half full of beans, half full of water, 24 hours.

That may be too much, but in the Decembeer from 2017 I don't recall anybody thinking the coffee was overpowering.

look into dry beaning with the whole bean. Hub Brewer can chime in perhaps, but he did a split batch with one half with cold brewed coffee and the other half dry beaned...and from the samples I tried I would pick the dry bean version any day. There was very little acidity at all...and a nice coffee flavor.

I've done both cold brew and dry-beaning and I have to say that I like the dry-beaning method better. The coffee flavour was richer to my tastes.

According to my recipe, I used 56 g of coarsely crushed dry beans in my 2017 advent stout ("Central Perk"), steeped for 24 hours - I believe that was the 5 gallon dosage.

mckay75 wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 09, 2019 11:29 am

look into dry beaning with the whole bean. Hub Brewer can chime in perhaps, but he did a split batch with one half with cold brewed coffee and the other half dry beaned...and from the samples I tried I would pick the dry bean version any day. There was very little acidity at all...and a nice coffee flavor.

Yeah my dry-beaned stout used a dosing rate of 6.1 grams whole coffee beans per L of finished beer, so about 115g into a keg. I left it for 3 days at fridge temp (~4C). It had consensus as the winner between the two, but we wanted to make sure you didn't have to go looking for the coffee in that one. Might not be everyone's cup of tea (coffee?)

I've done 3oz into a 5 gallon batch whole bean for 24-36hrs and it was maybe a little too much but worked quite well.