The last weeks were very calm.  Vacation, degustation, checking beer and more.  It was time to make a beerlabel for the American market.  After playing around with some ideas a friend of me came up with this design.  Check it out.

The label is not finished yet but it surely shows what it is about.

Meanwhile, I also made caramel candy with Masareng palmsugar.  Unsuccessfully …  The sugar did not really melt and was smelling like .. burned palmsugar.

Things start running again and soon there will be more chocolate news again.

Cheers

Tonight the pressure was getting too high.  I had to open one of these bottles that have been looking at me for almost a month.  The fermenting is over.  the second fermentation on the bottle should be over now.  Time to open one and check how it tastes.

I have a friend, Jim, from the USA and the first sip was left to him.

Oh yeah, and it was worth it.  Combined with Belcolade Papua New Guinea64 chocolate, the beer is dark in color with a smooth head. The flavor of oats, malts and a chocolate are balanced perfectly with the right amount of hops for a bittersweet finish.

You will hear more the upcoming days about the beer evolution.

Cheers

Alain

This summer is rocking, but not for chocolate production.  We are suffering temperatures above 32 degrees Celcius.  I ain’t complaining, it’s summertime.

While strolling the internet on a hot evening I found this item : Le Whif.  It’s some device to vaporise food instead of eating it.  I never tried it but if you can get a hold of the item, please let me know your experiences.

Meanwhile, I am gonna take a swim.  Enjoy the summertime.

Alain

Today I finally could bottle the Bio Shoq beer that has been brewn.  After 1 week of fermenting and 3 weeks of lagering it was ready to go into a bottle.

First of all, we added Arenga Palm Sugar and “champagne” yeast.  This makes sure that there is carbondioxide on the bottle after the maturing period of 12 weeks.  There are about 84 bottles of 70cl and 3 magnum bottles of 1,5 liter.

The barrels with beer

The beer after adding sugar and champagne yeast

Champagne yeast

Bottles

Final bottle and label

Corks and labeling machine

Now it’s waiting for the result.  Stay tuned for more news about brewing beer with chocolate.

Alain

Today I have been working on a little gift for a birth of a little human.  Instead of giving sugar beans and other stuff my friends had a more creative idea and have chosen to give a little chocolate gift.  So many ways to say thank you.

There were 4 different flavours, acasia honey-cinnamon with dark chocolate, hazelnut-pralinee with milkchocolate, fresh mint with white chocolate and nougat cream (from Vital Nougat) with milkchocolate.

Congrats to the parents of Vic !

Alain

From now on the fermentation process should be over and it’s time to go into a next stage with the newly born bio chocolate beer.  The beer is being transferred in a new barrel.  This barrel goes into a cooler for about 3 weeks.  There were no additional herbs added.

The rest fraction of the yeast has been poured into a bottle.  If you take a closer look at the picture you can see that there is an upper dark part, which contains beer and then there is a ground of dead yeast.  The sugars have been completely changed into alcohol.  The beer has an alcohol percentage of 8,9%.  Which isn’t that bad.

The restfraction of the yeast looks like chocolate.

A first taste of the fermented liquid gave a sour taste with slight touches of cocoa.   I hope to know more soon when lagering is over.

Cheers Alain

Today I went brewing a new beer based on chocolate.  The event took place at the Jessenhofke demobrewery

in Hasselt.  I can tell you, it was an amazing interesting day.  I can only recommend this experience.

We started out with grinding the malts used in the beer.

This malt goes into a kettle that is getting heated till a certain temperature to change the starch into sugars and then this hot soup of malt goes into a filterdevice.  The malt is being filtered from the liquid.

After filtering the liquid is being cooked togheter with the gold of every brewer : “hop”.

The cooked liquid goes through a cooling device and is then added into a sterile barrel. The secret spices are added and the yeast togheter with some sugar (the sugar is bio Arenga Palm Sugar).  In this barrel the beer will ferment for a week convert the sugars into alcohol.

Next week, after a week of fermenting, the beer is being poured into another barrel so it can lager for a few weeks.  After this lagering, I think at the end of June, the chocolate beer will go onto bottles where it can mature for another few months or years.

Thanks to Jessenhofke demobrewery for recipe and brewing and brewmaster Gert.

Lateron, the beer will b e available for tasting purposes.

Cheers Alain

A few days ago I was strolling in one of these flower malls and something caught my attention.  There was a stash of different herbs standing on a trolley and I found out that there was something special in it.

I found a mint plant which has a very specific mint chocolate taste.  Imagine yourself eating a chocolate with mint cream in it.  Amazing !!  I also bought a normal mint plant to compare both tastes in chocolate.  As you can see the leafs and the colors are a bit different.  I wonder what the difference will be in pralines with ganaches based on fresh mint.

Chocolate mint plant

Normal mint plant

I also bought a new product that is used in a lot of kitchens by pastry chefs.  The product name is Kappa.  It’s a carragene made from sea alges.  It has been re-invented by El Bulli in Spain.  It is used to make gels of products with preservation of the taste.  Once the product is ready I will post more about it.  (Thanks for the tip Xavier De Smit!)

Thats all for now, enjoy the last sun and perhaps a terrace and a good beer.

Alain

Another healthy day today.  I experimented with tea and chocolate.

I made a few pralines with ganache based on tea.  Not so easy to find the right amount of tea to put in.

I use natural tea from the Sao Paulo tea shop in Gent.  They have a lot of different sort of tea’s from all over the world.  The experiment I did today was based on Cherry taste tea and Energy welness tea.  You can find the ingredients of the tea below.

The first one is the Energy welness tea praline.  The tea consists of dried ingredients with apple, citronella grass, carrot, roseflower leafs and grapefruit.

Cooking the cream and milk with the tea

White Callebaut chocolate

Tempering the white chocolate

The result is a smooth and a bit grapefruit taste

The second praline is  made with cherry tea wich consists of dried ingredients of cherries, apple, hibiscus, rose-hip and elderberries.  When I mixed it with white chocolate I found out that the colour of the ganache turned out grey – purple.

Grey ganache, not really pleasant to see but an amazing perfume and taste.

Cherry tea praline (I can make the colour more purple with colouring agent but I prefer not to use chemicals for the experiment)

More about chocolate and tea very soon.  Keep visiting the site.

Grtz Alain

The last days I have been experimenting with some new things.  First of all there is this wonderfull nougat granulate from Vital Nougat that can be used to pour into chocolate bars.  Makes me think a bit about the Toblerone bars, but they have more taste when you use the softer granulate instead of the hard pieces and they are easier to bite.

Second thing that I tested was the mould I got from IBC with decoration inside.  It is a bit more work to handle than the makrolon hard moulds but the result is funny.  This was the first time that I used these kind of mould. See for yourself.

Ofcourse with Easter it is necessary to have chocolate eggs, filled with different flavours.  I made some with pralineé filling, fondant sugar with cherries and with Vital’s nougat cream.  They are really delicious.  It is definately worth a try.  I only have a picture of some in a box since all the eggs I made have been delivered to people I know.

And last but not least, to use the rest of all the fillings I made, there are heart shaped pralines in white chocolate.  I don’t like to throw away food and re-use the leftovers into new pralines.  Maybe I find a new taste while doing that.

Soon there will be more news about my new project.  I deposited an idea at I-depot for developtment of a new product based on chocolate.

Enjoy chocolate !