Oaking an amber ale: what to do?

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!

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!

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.