Adding cocoa nibs...

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stratslinger

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I've got a chocolate stout in primary now, coming up on 2 weeks. I'll be sampling it tomorrow for gravity and to get a feel for how much chocolate character is in the beer (used chocolate malt in the grist and cocoa powder as a 5 minute boil addition).

I'm thinking about adding cocoa nibs if there's less chocolate character than I wanted. I've done a little reading up, and I intend to sanitize them with a couple ounces of vodka, if I need to use them at all. But I've read a couple conflicting pieces of advice on actually adding the nibs, and wanted to see if I could get a consensus:

Should I dump these into a secondary vessel and rack the beer onto them, or just dump them (carefully!) into my primary? I've been skipping the secondary now for my last several brews to very good results, but it seems like dumping something into the primary at this stage, no matter how carefully, could be a recipe for oxidation. Am I right, or am I just being overcautious?
 
I did a chocolate bock last year and what I did was put the nibs in a container with a little bit of vodka for a day or so to sanitize, then put the nibs in my secondary and racked on top of it. However, I think you'd be okay adding them to the primary after fermentation has stopped as this is what I did with strawberries when I made a strawberry blonde. Just try not to splash.

Side note: You may want to consider putting a vanilla bean in with the cocoa nibs/vodka mixture to further bring out the chocolate notes.
 
I probably should have pointed out, primary is a 6 gallon better bottle. It's going to be tough to drop in the nibs without splashing, I think.
 
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