Stovepipe Crow

Tonight, we cooked up another stout: A dark chocolate mole stout that I'm gonna call Stovepipe Crow. Took the name from a line in a Ray Wylie Hubbard song: "Tornado Ripe" has a line about crows on a chimney being a sign someone's gonna die. Don't know this brew will be quite that hot, but the line was irresistible. And wouldn't that be one helluva band name?

I'm using the same base ingredients kit from Midwest Supplies as B) Endarkenment, that Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout I cooked up a coupla month's ago. The cook is identical: same ingredients, times, etc. The difference will be when I move the brew from my primary fermenter to my secondary after a week of happy fermentation. Instead of peanut butter powder, I'm going to have a hops bag full of smoked serrano peppers and some cinnamon sticks. I'll still add some cocoa powder and cocoa nibs (also in the hops bag, at least the nibs!) for a deep bitter chocolate flavor. And yeah, there are plenty of mole recipes that call for peanuts, but none in mine, thank you. (At least not for this batch! Mebbe next time...) I'm hoping for something in between Country Boy's Jalapeno Smoked Porter and New Holland's El Mole Ocho, except a touch hotter and a little heartier than either.

I'm anxious to see how much of the smoked flavor the brew picks up from the smoked serranos.

That's all that's been happening in the Kitchen tonight. Late start what with trivia night at Patchens Pub (best spot for Sunday night trivia in Lexington!) and the tail end of the Jimbo Mathus show at the Green Lantern, Lexington. Kick ASS show! Visit Jimbo's Facebook page and definitely make the effort if he's gonna show up near your town! Great show!!!

For what that's worth, the Green Lantern is a great place to catch a show. Exactly the sorta place you'd want to be on a warm Sunday night. To give you an idea of the atmosphere, as closing time approached, tunes ranged from David Alan Coe's "You Don't Have to Call Me Darlin'" to John Prine's "Illegal Smile" and they all seemed appropriate.

The wort chiller is runnin' and I'm outta here. Drink like a chimney; jump like a crocodile!