Help with old beam for mantle

It's hard to recommend without seeing what you've tried and without knowing how willing/able you are to experiment with it. You could try several finishes/methods on the part of the beam that would be against the wall/chimney and settle on one that gets you the closest to what you want.

Some things you might try:

Use a pre-stain conditioner. This will kind of fill the especially porous areas of the beam and prevent the stain from soaking in unevenly. Perhaps a second coat of pre-stain conditioner would do the trick? You could try thinned shellac too maybe. That's essentially what the commercial pre-stain conditioner is, but you might get better results thinning it on your own, etc.

Espresso and Jacobean are pretty dark colors. You might try multiple coats of lighter colors and keep applying until you get the shade you want. There's also no reason why you have to use multiple coats of the same color either. You might try a more "greenish brown" first and top it with a "reddish brown" to get your color. Or, vice-versa depending on what your desired end result is.

There are "gel stains" which are more like paint in some ways than stains. They're designed to kind of sit on top of the wood more than soak into it as much as standard stains do. I've never really liked gel stains, but a lot of people do.

There are also wood dyes that soak in and color wood differently than stains. You might look at a dye instead. This site has some good pictures to compare the two.

You could apply an oil to the wood. That wouldn't necessarily change the color as much as a stain, but it might give the wood what could be considered a "wet" look and deepen the color enough for you. There are also colored oils (Danish Oil, etc.) that impart subtle coloring effect. Maybe enough to cancel out the orange hue you mention.

Colored waxes might give you a bit of color and warmth that you wouldn't get with stain and a combination of dye, stain and wax is do-able, and sometimes used on furniture pieces.

Some of these options are perhaps a little "over the top" for this project, but hopefully it will allow you to expand your research to some new options for getting the exact finish you're looking for.