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StittsvilleJames · 07-07-2011, 12:23 PM

I just brewed up an amber ale, and would like to add some oak flavours to it.

I bought a little bit of oak chips (35g, ~1 1/4 oz) from my lhbs, and have them sitting in a jar soaking in malibu rum (for the coconut flavours). They're in about 3-4 oz of rum.

I am planning on leaving those soaking for ~5 days (is that too long, or not long enough?), until the primary is done, and then adding them to the beer.

How do I do that?

I was going to drain the chips out of the rum and then just dump them into the carboy and rack on top of them. But then I read other people have added the booze along with the chips, but others who have drained them first and not added the booze.

I also don't know whether I should put them into a bag or not before putting them in the carboy. I don't want to screw up the surface area ratio, but also don't want them floating around making it hard to bottle the beer. Will they settle out if left in the carboy for a week?

Any advice you have for oaking beer would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

**unionrdr** · 07-07-2011, 12:42 PM

I added the chips & liquor. My reason being that the booze isn't just being soaked up by the chips. The booze is also soaking flavor out of the chips. Ever soaked hickory bark in some water for the bbq? If you wait long enough,the water starts turning brown.
That's flavor soaking out of it. Same reaction here. So pour it all through a muslin grain sack into secondary vessel. Tie off the bag at the top,& toss it in,racking beer on top of it. I used 4oz of medium toast French oak chips soaked with 5 jiggers (7.5oz) of 8 year old Beam's Black Kentucky bourbon.
It sat in secondary with the dark ale I brewed for 8 days. It got fairly strong. I primed & bottled it on 7/2. It'll have to age awhile to mellow & mingle the flavors.

StittsvilleJames · 07-07-2011, 01:11 PM

Awesome! Thanks a lot for the advice. I sooooo hope this tastes like it does in my head, because if it does, it's gonna be fabulous!

Thanks!

**Steelers77** · 07-07-2011, 02:24 PM

You could also just add the rum at bottling time if you don't want to deal with the chips. You can also control the taste by adding some, sample, adding more, sample ect.