Stout flavouring

[ChilliMayne]

Planning for my first stout and I want to use oatmeal and flavour it with a chocolate.
Do you need to prep the oatmeal prior to putting it into the mash tun?
I was thinking of using drinking chocolate to flavour, by making up a cold batch of drinking chocolate and adding it to the bottling bucket, priming with gyle/speise too.

Any advice to the amount of chocolate to use or any pitfalls I need to be aware of?

If I add coffee too am I just messing with it too much? :?

 

[Kaiser]

No need to prep the oatmeal. Just add our to the mash.

try the various flavors on a sample first before you commit a batch to it. Make sure that the chocolate doesn't contain much oil or fat.

Kai

 

[Scrumpy]

I like chocolate stouts, but I would be concerned about the ingredients in your drinking chocolate and how they could negatively affect your beer. Powdered cocoa will eventually settle out of suspension to the bottom of the bottles, but that's not a big deal. As long as you account for the large amount of sugar in the Drinking chocolate for priming, that's no prob. The powdered milk though...that could ruin a good batch of beer IMO. Most have other things as well which might get funky, milk solids, salt, casein, whey, corn starch, preservatives.
I would go for the cacao nibs in the secondary approach, and maybe some lactose if you are looking for some sweet.

 

[Praetor]

Don't use a chocolate milk or anything like that. I use unsweatened bakers chocolate. I also add fresh ginger to the batch. I add the to the boil and they work fairly well.

 

[Nosybear]

Was skulking around a spice shop with the Mrs. a few weeks back and ran into some cocoa nibs that smell like finished chocolate. You might try that instead of using chocolate, which has added oils. If you want to go with finished chocolate, I've seen bars out there with greater than 90% cocoa content. Higher in this case is likely better. You will be getting some vanilla in the finished chocolate. Just remember, Hershey's is not the only cocoa out there.