vanilla beans

Im brewing jim wagners valilla bean oat stout from more beer and was wondering how long the vanilla beans should stay in the secondary? I t with three whole beans and i split them and tossed them into the secondary. Og was 1.081 went into the secondary at 1.02

Taste and decide for yourself. Just did a vanilla porter and left mine on the beans 10 days once I felt the vanilla was right. It will fade with time so slightly more than you want in the finished product is not a bad thing. Mine has lost the vanilla up front but enhanced the chocolate, much like when using vanilla when baking from what I'm told, which is what I wanted.

thanks, i havent pulled a sample since it went into the seconday but ill try it this weekend.

I would go with testing it. Personally i liked oak.I tried vanilla from my homebrew shop and it was old or licorishy or something didnt taste right.I actually thought i got a better vanilla taste from a light oak dry hopp for 6 days.If you get a fresh one it may be differnet, i dont really trust my lhbs as far as freshness. Ive gotten almost expired yeast also.Red flag.Mail order... I dont appreciate things like that that they think i wont notice.

i was actually thinking about bottling half and putting an ounce of so of bourbon soaked oak cubes in the rest and letting that sit a couple months

SWMBO and I both love vanilla, so we're loading it up on a oaked bourbon vanilla robust porter (gotta shorten that up somehow) that got brewed last weekend. We dropped two vanilla beans into the boil at flameout, then moved them into primary with the wort. We're also soaking oak chips in bourbon, along with about an ounce of vanilla powder for secondary addition. After that sits for a couple weeks, we're planning on having some high quality vanilla extract on hand for the bottling bucket as needed.