As I am currently looking for activities to do while Sheltered In Place in San Francisco, I recently got a text from Phil Emmerson, Head of Brewing at Almanac Brewing. He had just done an Imperial Stout with a variety of spices(which gave the beer an Umburana aroma)as well as cocoa nibs. Did I want the spent nibs?
Ok, this is going to sound strange, but the answer was yes! About a year ago, I did an experiment with spent nibs from the Social Kitchen Brewpub in San Francisco. Kim Sturdevant, is the brewmaster there and he is also the inventor of the beer style: Brut IPA. He told me he had done a beer with cacao. It was a Saison, aged in a red wine barrel with Bret and cocoa nibs. I had to go try the beer. He asked if I wanted the spent nibs. Hmmmmm, sure why not. I dried the nibs and put them through my chocolate making equipment and turned the spent nibs into chocolate bars. Most interesting is that not only does the chocolate contribute to the beer, but the nibs absorb the beer. WOW, beer flavored chocolate. These particular nibs carried the flavor of the Bret, the red grape flavor and some Saison yeasty character. Probably the most interesting chocolate I have tasted. What a way to start a new crazy hobby and get amazing results the first try!Now I get asked every few months to pick up spent nibs.
It is not all great in the world of spent nibs. There is some interesting chemistry going on. I learned the hard way that you need to wash the nibs when you get them out of the fermenter. There is a yeast accumulation factor that gives the nibs an intensely bitter character. Wasing the nibs gets rid of a lot, but not all of the increased bitterness. A cooking technique that my wife told me about is that if in cooking the food is too bitter, add slat! So now I can add salt to get the bitterness in the chocolate at a better level.
Also, a technique I helped develop almost 20 years ago in making chocolate beer,is to use cocoa nibs instead of chocolate bars. First, chocolate bars are usually not 100% chocolate. Lots of sugar and sometimes milk are added. To get the most chocolate character, utilizing cocoa nibs which are 100% chocolate is the way to go. If you put chocolate on the hot side of the brewery, a lot of the chocolate character is aroma and it is blown off by the heat. Putting the nibs on the cold side is better. Similar to dry hopping. An added technique is to heat the nibs to about 100C. This will kill any critters on the nibs as well as the heat gets the oil in the chocolate migrating to the surface. People ask, won't the oil take away the foam. It hasn't yet!
But when you use spent nibs, you can tell when you are grinding the nibs,that the chocolate is much thicker than normal. The level of coca butter in the nibs is reduced in the beer. So to make smoother chocolate in the bars, I add additional cocoa butter.
The chocolate I just made from the Almanac Imperial Stout is wonderful! My friends, the added salt and the additional cocoa butter got me out of a potential jam and produced an exotic beer flavored dark chocolate bar. Not a bad day's work
