Soak the oak?

I'm planning on brewing a fat ass stout, this weekend and will be throwing some oak cubes into my secondary and letting it sit for a couple months. Now I would like to incorporate a local distilleries bourbon with this beer, and since said bourbon is a very limited batch I am wondering if it would be more efficient to soak my oak cubes or to add the oak and the bourbon directly to the secondary without any type of soaking.

I'd say you most certainly want to soak the cubes first and just add the enitre thing, bourbon and cubes, to the secondary.

You want to soak them to ensure you kill any nasties that might be on the oak.

I have a stout conditioning right now. I soaked the oak in Makers Mark and added about a cup directly to secondary.

if i don't soak i'll be doing a steam sanitation of the oak.

The bourbon I wanna use is about 40 bucks for a 375ml bottle and theres only around 700 bottles of it. So if I was to steam sanitize my oak, then add X amount of bourbon to my secondary could i achieve the same results as adding soaked cubes with no bourbon?

Generally speaking how much bourbon would be used for a 5 gallon batch? (assuming the bourbon is added directly to the secondary)

Boleslaus said:

I have a stout conditioning right now. I soaked the oak in Makers Mark and added about a cup directly to secondary.

Click to expand...

How are the samples tasting?

Cisteve said:

Generally speaking how much bourbon would be used for a 5 gallon batch? (assuming the bourbon is added directly to the secondary)

Click to expand...

Ive never added bourbon to a beer until this week, but I did a bunch of looking around at different recipes and it looks like 1.5-2 cups is pretty normal. Maybe someone with some more experience will chime in.

I haven't sampled it since I added the bourbon and oak (about 2 months ago).

Cisteve said:

if i don't soak i'll be doing a steam sanitation of the oak.

The bourbon I wanna use is about 40 bucks for a 375ml bottle and theres only around 700 bottles of it. So if I was to steam sanitize my oak, then add X amount of bourbon to my secondary could i achieve the same results as adding soaked cubes with no bourbon?

Click to expand...

I am really wondering if the quality of the bourbon plays a big enough role in the taste as it just imparts some flavor. I myself would use something not as pricey but thats my 2 cents....(and im cheap prick at times)