Making Your Own Extras

I tried to put hazelnuts in the boil for my porter and I'm getting none of that flavor. I want to try and make my own extract but I have a few questions I couldn't find answers to anywhere. I want to impart as little flavor as possible from the added liquor so I am thinking of using grain alcohol. When people cook with extract they cook off the alcohol, is it possible to do this once you have aged your alcohol with whatever you want to extract? I want to get as much of just the pure flavor as I can.

I recently read about making a cacao extract with cacao nibs. They strilke me as similar to hazlenut. Soak them in vodka (or grain if thats what u have) for several days. I'd go 3 oz of grain per every oz of hazlenut. Let them sit in the grain for 2-3 days and then stain it into a tupperware container. Freeze that for a day and skim off the lipid layer if there is any on top. Whats left should be your extract. U may wanna crush the hazlenuts as well before adding them to the grain. Most of what i've read here involves adding that extract to either the secondary ferment or to the bottle bucket when bottling. U may need to experiment with amounts to get the taste where u want it.

I'm more interested in the boiling off of the alcohol so that it is actually just the flavor extract. Is that how its done because there must be some alternate method for getting natural flavor extracts that don't include alcohol.

Im not aware of how to draw it off without the alcohol. Unless u follow my steps and then reduce it down over heat. Problem ur gonna have is there isn't gonna be much water in it and its gonna get thick and syrupy. Maybe someone else will see this post and be able to add another way but ive only every seen flavor extracts that have alcohol in them. Unless u start getting into flavor syrups, like those found in Starbucks or other coffee shops. If u go that route u might have some fermentation issues.

What your after is a tincture or a concentrated essence of the flavor aroma your looking for. Plenty of information on the interwebs on the subject.

The big thing is that you need a solvent of some nature to extract the flavor from the item. Since this is for consumption a food grade solvent is recommended which usually is alcohol.

We had an Iron Brewer competition in our club and I had to brew with Reese's Puffs cereal. I soaked some in in vodka and added it post fermentation. I only ended up adding about an ounce and a half to 5 gallons. The alcohol flavor from that amount of vodka was negligible.

If you are adding an oz of 95% alcohol to 5 gallons of beer you are looking at adding 29.6ml to 18944ml of beer. That is .0015% of the beer worth of additive and the alcohol increase is nearly negligible. For a 5% beer it would go up to 5.14%
If you use 80 proof vodka it increases it to 5.05%.

I tried adding pecans to a beer in the boil and the secondary, and the resulting beer had no pecan flavor. I have heard of people having success when adding them to the mash, so you could try that. However most people who i talked to recommended making an extract with alcohol as a few people have mentioned already.

I understand that I need some alcohol and I'm not hugely worried about it but I am trying to find the way that "real" extracts are made. I have read about tinctures but I could not find anything about the way the flavor reacts. Is it denatured or ruined in the boil down process?

I would imagine the essential oils you are looking for are boiled off in the same way your flavor/aroma hop additions would act if you put then in the boil too soon.

I bet you would have good results with cracking or crushing them and letting them sit over a few oz of vodka during the last week of your primary fermentation. Dump the whole mix into a secondary fermentor and rack the beer onto it. Taste it every few days to see if you get the right amount of flavor then bottle/keg from there. If its still not where you want it after a certain amount of time I would suggest grating some into more vodka and add it at bottling/kegging.

You're only looking to put those oils and flavor compounds into the beer and that seems about the quickest way of doing just that. Unless you buy some hazelnut extract online somewhere.

P.S. By boiling the mixture after it sits to get the alcohol out will more then likely do the same thing as adding the nuts directly to the boil. I wouldn't do it.

mesnaric - The "real" extracts are often made by boiling the substance (spices/whatever) in water, and collecting the vapours that contain the volatile oils. The oils are seperated from the condensed steam, and you are left with the "real extracts". This process takes 4-5 hours, and just for small scale processes, the glassware needed will run you >500$.

The alcohol soak is a great alternative, but in most cases you cannot cook off the alcohol as the hazelnut oils you want will also boil off.