|BACKGROUND|

On a happy note, I managed to fill up an entire moleskine journal with recipes this years, not even including transcribing older recipes off of my old laptop’s word documents. To me, it’s great to have ideas and know what I’m brewing so far out in advance. Plus, it means that I also have a plethora of idea for not only personal use, but also doing collaborations with other local breweries for the gastropub I work at.

However, there are also multitudes of ideas that I sometimes never even write down or have just had for years and never get around to fully fleshing them out, whether is be delusions of grandeur or just the lack of capacity to see them through. For a very long time, since I had locked myself into the idea of doing a doppelbock, but having no capacity for lagering, it just loomed in the dark recesses of my mind, on and off. Until Marshall Schott over at Brulosphy completely debunked that I had to actually brew a lager at lager temps, I had just entirely shelved it as not being feasible.

I’ve actually wanted to do this beer for a little over 3 years. The concept drew more from the name, which originally started off just as a chocolate doppelbock, but then I figured “well, the cereal’s got sugar in it and it’s made of grains, so it should work, right?”

As is always the case with the Theory of Multiple Discovery, I was not alone in my idea of using breakfast cereal in beer. So far as I can tell, not too many breweries are playing with breakfast cereals in beer. I mean, yeah, Evil Twin’s been ripping along with Imperial Doughnut Break, and lord knows what the hell Omnipollo is doing putting burgers and fries into an IPA, but so far as I can tell, there’ve only been a few other breweries who’ve ventured into the breakfast cereal beer thunderdome. First was Black Bottle Brewing’s Cerealiously series, which is a rotating lines of beers that are, for lack of a better term, “dry-cerealed” with a rotating selection of the magical ingredients, and have been doing so since 2013. The second that I had heard of was a brewery local to me, Pizza Boy, where the brewer, Terry Hawbecker (an all around righteous dude), made their aptly name Boo Berry beer with the help of the Halloween cereal of the same name back in 2014, right about the time that I came up with my idea. While researching a bit more during writing this post, I’ve found two more articles listing some more breweries using cereal that came about in July this summer,

In the brief amount of research that I’ve done since I decided to pull the trigger on finally brewing this beer, it seems a lot more breweries have caught onto the idea and gone forward with it, listing at least 4 or 5 more breweries that I wasn’t even aware of doing the beers. Unbeknownst to me, Black Bottle has actually done a version of Cerealiously with Count Chocula, so I’m not even super clever on that front myself (which I honestly thought I was, but I had that lurking doubt that I couldn’t be the only one). It’s a little bit of a bummer that I never got the chance to brew this while I was working at a brewpub a few years ago, which would have given me ample access to a temperature control system, but such is life.

Thus, after brewing Steam Machine this summer, I now had no excuse for not brewing a doppelbock. Since the season was appropriate for it, I rearranged my planned sitrep for brewing to hop the beer forward a bit, hoping that it would be ready in time for Halloween (which was indeed cutting it close).

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 154F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 70%

Original Gravity: 1.077 // 18.7 P

Final Gravity: 1.018 // 2.6 P

Estimated ABV: 7.8%

IBUs: 21

Color: 56 EBC // 23 SRM

Recipe

Malts

9# German Munich | 60%

4# Floor-Malted Pilsner| 24%

1# CaraMunich | 6%

.5# Midnight Wheat | 3%

.5# Brown Sugar | 3% [Added post initial fermentation because “it wasn’t big enough”]

3 Boxes of Count Chockula Cereal (Yielding ~ .7# of Corn Sugar) | 4%

Hops

2 oz. Saaz @ 60 min

1 oz. Tettnang @ 25 min.

Yeast

SafLager 34/70 (x2 packets)

Spices and Stuff

2 tabs of WhirlFloc @ 15 min

2 oz. Cacao nibs, soaked in vodka

|BREW LOG|

This whole summer, I have seemed to somehow pick out the shittiest days to actually brew. It was muggy, it was unseasonably warm, and it was grey and rainy. Optimal conditions for brewing, right? The weather necessitating an overhead canopy, which does a great job of funneling the heat from the burner was a nice touch.

As per usual, I weighed out and measure the grains before milling them. From here, I then mixed the Count Chocula into the grains, as I was going to add it into my mash, running counter to what Black Bottle does with their brews, because there was no way in hell I was fitting three boxes of cereal into a carboy.

Now, the slightly tricky part about this is that I had absolutely no idea what the absorption rate of the cereal actually is. I’m going to guess it’s probably higher than regular grains, but I calculated it in with the others regardless, as it was at least something to calculate it in, rather than low balling hard and only guessing with the regular grains and coming up short.

Since I am trying to accurately guess how much alcohol is in this brew, I had to do some light math in order to estimate what the cereal is actually going to contribute to the brew. To start off, I can’t actually call if there were any extra starches or carbohydrates that could be converted in the mash with the diastatic power of the other grains, but I could at least guess what I could get from the sugar in the cereal.

Before I even brewed, I had done the calculations out in the recipe. Sadly, I realized on brewday that I was using numbers off of an old Nutritional Facts label from a previous incarnation of the cereal. So, on game day, I had to re-crunch the numbers quite fast, but I had at least gotten the method down, so it was use the same steps, but swap the numbers. Stupid companies trying to make their sugary, delicious cereal more healthy for kids. (note: shout out to anyone who remember Cookie Crisp being actual cookies and not whatever janky wafer bullshit it is now). Not only that, the boxes were downsized from 12 oz. to 10.2 oz. I was heartbroken.

Serving size of Count Chocula is 3/4 cup (25g) 9g sugar per serving One (1) box is 10.2 oz of cereal, so ~ 11 servings of cereal per box 11 x 9 = 99, so 99g of sugar/box Three (3) boxes of cereal = 297g of sugar, total 297g / 28 = 10.6 oz. sugar (28 grams in an ounce) 10.6 / 16 = .66 lbs (16 oz. in a lbs)

I had initially calculated almost twice that amount of sugar, based on old numbers and a larger box. Sadly, this is why the beer is not quite as high in gravity as I had wanted (was initially shooting for closer to 9% abv).

With the small addition of the Midnight Wheat, and I can only guess the cereal as well, the pH came out pretty close to the magical 5.4-5.2 range without the addition of any adjustments. That is actually just sheer luck, not any planning. Again, the cereal is a super wildcard addition – I had almost no way of predicting what effect it could have on the beer, aside from the loose calculations I had done to attempt on figuring out how much it would contribute fermentable-wise. Otherwise, it came out in the range of what I wanted for the mash temp – I was initially shooting for closet to 156F – but 154F would absolutely leave me with enough residual sugars to give the beer body and malt character appropriate to the style.

After the 60 minute mash, I started to collect the first runnings in the brew kettle. Turns out that it gave me a great amount of the juice, netting about 3.5 gallons of wort. In an attempt to see if I could raise my efficiency a little bit more, I opted to try batch sparging this round, especially since I was getting some goddamn mucky-muck action in the mash from all the cereal and marshmallows. The beer had an absolutely gorgeous color at this point, although since I didn’t also expect it, the cereal contributed a lot more darkness as well. I ended up with about 8 gallons of what looked like cold-brewed coffee. I actually ended up having a lot of residual second runnings left, easily more than 6 cups worth. I don’t think that the cereal had as high of an absorption rate as I had calculated for.

The boil itself was relatively uneventful. With only two small hop additions, it was a breeze, but it did allow my to focus on some side projects, like getting ready for the second brew of the day, as well as attempting to salvage the extra left over wort. To this measure, I applied a method that I had used when I brewed a wee heavy a few years ago – I made a reduction. I tossed the extra cups of sauce into a pan, threw that bitch on another burner, and just let it rip.

It’s worth pointing out that the side burner on a grill is not exactly what I’d call “effective” for getting a crazy boil going. I think I managed to reduce it to about half the volume that I had salvaged from the end of the sparge. Sadly, with the power of the burner and the limited time that I had, I wasn’t able to get it down to a thick syrup like I wanted, but it was definitely at least reduced down enough that adding in at the end of the boil wasn’t just adding a less concentrated solution and (slightly) watering down the end results.

The only extra step during the boil was that I added two tabs of WhirlFloc instead of one. I’ve found that it actually helps with higher gravity beers, as well as that’s actually recommended by the manufacturer. If I recall correctly, the single tab is calculated out for gravities about 1.050, but that’s trying to work off a hazy memory of the bag from the brewpub days. Regardless, this is not a Treehouse/Tired Hands inspried doppelbock, I want it to look nothing like a bottle of Yoohoo. Two it is.

I had checked my preboil gravity and it was spot on (clocking in at 1.052), and the post boil cooldown followed suit relatively well. I crashed the beer down to 60F with ye olde set up (cooler o’ ice water > fountain pump > immersion chiller), but even though I wanted to initially start at 55F, I was cranky and impatient because of the atmosphere of the day. Plus, shaving off those few extra degrees is almost a point of diminishing returns on the length of time it would take. Besides, this is essentially a steam doppelbock anyways, a few degrees isn’t going to really hurt it. I had already rehydrated my lovely glass of Frosty-esque yeast, and after checking the gravity, used a sanitized funnel to dollop that magical liquid into the carboy.

The gravity was pretty much on point for what I had calculated out with the Brewer’s Friend calculator I use (since I am still still too cheap to pony up for BeerSmith), and I’m guessing that I got an exceptionally high yield, as I almost entirely filled up a 6 gallon carboy with wort (perhaps my boils aren’t that rigorous? The look it). I know that beers in volume always look darker than they will in the glass, but this shit looked like a baltic porter in color. After pitching and hooking up the blowoff tube, the beer was left to its own devices in the basement, which given this season would hold an ambient temp of 60F at best. Perfectly okay for the pseudo-lager.

Checking in after 24 hours to see how things were going, I got a nice surprise. After having a discussion with one of the guys at my LHBS, where I had stopped to pick up some emergency grains because the CaraMunich wasn’t going to arrive in time and I somehow forgot that I would need rice hulls with the cereal, I had mentioned what I was brewing and he had asked if I was worried that the preservatives were going to affect fermentation. Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Low and behold, my worries were laid to rest, and quite dramatically. Probably a combination of little head room, high pitching, and high gravity, but the doppelbock was gushing more than a crazy horse girl talking about how much she loves being an “equestrian”.

The final challenge came after active fermentation had finished, and I gave it a few more days to finish up, allowing almost 2 weeks total for fermenting upon a gravity reading, I got a 1.022 – not bad, but not what I wanted I really wanted an 8% doppelbock. I instructed my dad to make a simple syrup with 1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup brown sugar to try and boost the ABV a bit, but also to see if I couldn’t kickstart fermentation again to drive it a little lower. The other beer I had brewed along side it was also still slightly higher than I wanted for an FG, so I let the beer ride another 3-4 days. Checked again – same gravity, both fronts. Thus, time to bottle.

After soaking over night in a little ziplock bag of vodka, 2 oz. of cacao nibs got dumped into the carboy for 3 days of contact. Admittedly, this is pretty short, but I also wasn’t try to make some diabetic coma inducing chocolate abortion. I just wanted a light accent if the chocolate.

for the yield of the batch, I got about 4.75 gallons of brew, and primed with 3.9 oz of dextrose in a syrup, yielded a little under 2 cases, only because I still like having a few bombers too. I actually wanted just a hint more chocolate flavor, so I added in a bit more of the left chocolate extract (re: infused vodka), and it picked it up to where I wanted it.

From there, it was the waiting game. Unfortunately, I bottled on the 30th, so the beers were not going to be ready for Halloween as I had hoped. I had a few disappointed friends on that front. A week late is better than nothing at all, and then it was ready

Tasting Notes

To be completely honest, I had forgotten what a doppelbock actually tasted like. Since I had to fix that before giving any sort of reasonable look at my beer, I had to remedy that. Easily enough, I grabbed an Ayinger Celebrator, which was much lower in alcohol than I remembered, only clocking in at 6.7%. That made me much more comfortable with my abv envy. For what it’s worth, here’s a color comparison of Ayinger’s doppelbock:

Suffice it say, up against a time tested benchmark of a style, a great majority of the rest would roll off, but to my surprise, ol’ Count Bockula actually stood up to Celebrator well.

The color is on point, the mouth feel is on point. The two points that it wavers slightly on is that Ayinger has a slightly more fruitcake little twinge to it and it’s stupid lager clean. On the other hand, CB has a kiss of chocolate at the back of the palate and, while having a lager-like quality, isn’t full blown lagerland.

That being said:

Count Bockula pours like Seattle coffee out of a French Press, leaving a slightly beige/ivory head, which is in stack contrast with the almost Porter-like color.

There’s lot of bready fruit notes complimenting the chocolate on the nose. This honestly almost has a holiday vibe (well, I mean, it does), minus the spices.

The body is full, but not motor oil RIS thick, and the supple carbonation helps balance out the mouthfeel to not leaving it heavy.

The flavor of the beer follows the nose, but in a 3-course meal fashion. At first, the beer comes on a little malty-bready, then slides smoothly into the sweet, plumy fruit tones, and then finishes with a light, lingering chocolate at the back. All of the flavors are pretty well balanced, none truly overriding the others and mixing quite nicely. It tastes a little less like a lager than the steam beer did, but it’s definitely discernibly a doppelbock.

In the end, I’m fucking ecstatic how it turned out, especially since I didn’t even remember what a doppelbock tasted like for a hot sec. Not only that, I finally got to brew a recipe that I’ve wanted to make for years, and I think that’s honestly the sweetest victory here.