Need input on cranberry poundage for a nut brown recipe

First off, this will be the beer I am brewing for this: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f67/nut-brown-ag-30187/

I've been wanting to brew a nut brown (this one looks/sounds excellent) with cranberries for a couple months now, mainly for Thanksgiving-time. Would anyone have an idea of how many pounds I could use? I'm thinking 3 lbs, at this point, but I don't know if that's too much or too little since I've only used them in Wits before and not borderline dark-beers. I'm going to pulverize them and boil them for roughly 10 minutes in a just enough water to kill bacteria and wild yeast cells on their skins. I'll be adding them to the secondary and racking onto them. I have a 6.5 gal carboy, so that should handle the volume of beer + cranberry sludge. Please hit me up with your suggestions/opinions, cheers!

I just did a cranberry-apple lager for Thanksgiving (a 3 gallon recipe), used 1lb of cranberries steeped for 10 minutes at flameout and racked to secondary on top of 8 more oz. I also left the original cranberry-apple mixture in the primary. I ran the cranberries through the shredder of my food processor (about the consistency of slaw) each time. It has a good cranberry flavor to it that is pretty pronounced, so I imagine for a 5.5 gallon recipe, 3lbs would give a strong cranberry flavor and 2lbs if you just want a hint of it in the background. I've never used them in a dark beer, though.

zzARzz said:

I just did a cranberry-apple lager for Thanksgiving (a 3 gallon recipe), used 1lb of cranberries steeped for 10 minutes at flameout and racked to secondary on top of 8 more oz. I also left the original cranberry-apple mixture in the primary. I ran the cranberries through the shredder of my food processor (about the consistency of slaw) each time. It has a good cranberry flavor to it that is pretty pronounced, so I imagine for a 5.5 gallon recipe, 3lbs would give a strong cranberry flavor and 2lbs if you just want a hint of it in the background. I've never used them in a dark beer, though.

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Thanks for the input. Cheers! My friend and I overhauled the original recipe to make it an imperial and I tinkered with the ingredients. We'll be using 5-6 lbs of cranberries.

pgenius, I was thinking of brewing the same beer for Thanksgiving this year. How did 5-6 lbs of cranberries work out for you?