Vanilla Porter

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MichaelSterling

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i want to make a vanilla porter with real vanilla beans. when should i put the beans in and how many beans? im making 5 gals.
 
When I've used them, I put them in during the secondary fermentation.

3 Beans gives a good strong vanilla flavor, just make sure you split them open before adding them.
 
nother vote for secondary. 2 to 3 is usually perfect split and scraped into the bottom of the vessle before racking the beer onto it. Taste it prior to bottling/kegging. if you want a little more flavor add a few drops of vanilla extract to taste with your priming sugar (if bottling) or another split bean to the keg
 
i have yet to try this but i did a bluberry wheat and with 2.5 lbs of berries the color was great but it was a VERY light berry flavor. to light for me. so this guy tells me to just put 2 oz of extract right in the keg with the beer. i think i might do that next time. maybe not with extract but fresh berry juice.

if your bottling why not poor the extract into the bucket.

just a thought.
 
i have yet to try this but i did a bluberry wheat and with 2.5 lbs of berries the color was great but it was a VERY light berry flavor. to light for me. so this guy tells me to just put 2 oz of extract right in the keg with the beer. i think i might do that next time. maybe not with extract but fresh berry juice.

if your bottling why not poor the extract into the bucket.

just a thought.

I tried a blueberry cream ale using just blueberry extract and while the flavor is non-existent and the aroma is very faint, the extract added an unpleasant taste/mouthfeel to the cream ale. I had split the batch to see if there was a difference that was noticeable and there definitely was. The cream ale is nearly gone and the blueberry cream ale has half the bottles left.

I tried again with splitting a batch of red ale with half getting the blueberry extract and got the same unpleasant taste/mouthfeel with the blueberry extract.

If you add fresh berry juice to your keg, you are introducing another fermentable sugar that may give you more carbonation than you want in your keg. You can stop the fermentation by killing the yeast and then force carbing if you want.
 
I'm not sure just how you would kill the yeast but if you don't you will have a vigorous fermentation again. I know that with wine, you can add campden tablets to stop fermentation before bottling and so you can add sweetner but I don't know how that would affect beer.
 

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