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kevinlassen · 12-02-2012, 06:04 PM

Ok, I'm new to the forum and to brewing. I'm on my 4th brew and decided to make a whiskey stout. A friend made one and added his wood chips and whiskey to the second fermentation. I was thinking about doing the same. Others told me just to soak the chips and just add chips. Thoughts?

**unionrdr** · 12-02-2012, 07:30 PM

Soak 4oz of chips in 3-4 jiggers of whiskey in an airtight container in the fridge when the beer goes in the fermenter. Leave it in the fridge till the beer hits Fg & clears. Por the chips & whiskey through a sanitized hop sock into secondary,tie it off,& drop it in. Rack the beer onto that. Leave it for a week,then take a 1 shot sample to see ig it's where you want it.

**VegasJ** · 12-02-2012, 08:07 PM

I have GOT to try a whiskey stout next time...

any particular whiskey to use that is best?

**unionrdr** · 12-02-2012, 08:09 PM

Not really,whatever you enjoy. I used Beam's Black 8 year old bourbon.

**DromJohn** · 12-02-2012, 10:33 PM

4 oz chips soaked in 375 ml of 101. Just bottled, but tasting I think there's too much whiskey.

**sok454** · 12-03-2012, 12:50 AM

I did 20 ozof Irish whiskey w vanilla beans soaked in it for 3 weeks. Added at bottling. Tastes pretty good. Will take a bit longer to remove the hotness of the whiskey though. Each week it gets better.

kevinlassen · 12-03-2012, 10:45 AM

Ended up using 4 oz of toasted jack chips and soaking them in about a pint of jack. They will soak for a week. I'm going to add it to the second ferment.

**Stix** · 12-03-2012, 11:15 AM

This is one of my favorites to make. I use Jameson whiskey. 3.5 ounces soaked in oak chips. I do not bother with hop sack. I just dump them straight in after fermentation. I do dip the whole container in sanitizer before opening and dumping. Very easy to siphon with oak chips. The whiskey barrel I let set for 5 weeks before testing. It ages nicely. The longer it sets the better it is.

**Barnesie** · 12-03-2012, 11:24 AM

I'm sure what I did was technically wrong or horribly bad practice, but I used a slightly different technique for a IIPA recently.

I got a couple of bags of oak and apple chunks from a moonshine distillery. The chunks had been used to oak age moonshine in a stainless vat, so they cautioned me to not toss them in a gas grill because they'd explode with all the residual 'shine still in the wood.

We brewed a batch of IIPA, put appx 5 gallons of wort into the primary (on top of a yeast cake - SHOCK - double bad practice in one batch?!?) and took about a gallon and pitched it into a 2 gallon bucket on top of a few chunks of apple and oak. I reserved a small amount of yeast slurry for the 2 gallon split and pitched it directly and let it ferment on top of the wood.

I didn't assume that it would work perfectly, but I checked on the second bucket after the main batch finished and was surprised to find that it wasn't infected and tasted pretty darn good. The wood flavor was huge, but I figured it'd balance nicely once integrated with the main batch, so I racked it off into a pot and gave it a 15 minute boil just in case.

If we weren't pressed for time, I would have done a secondary of the combined beers since there was a little bit of sediment from the wood, but I just added my priming sugar to the wood-aged portion when boiling it, then dropped both in a bottling bucket and packaged.

The beer has aged very nicely over the last month and it's HUGE flavor country.