Flavouring Stout in Secondary - How long

Hey folks,

Going to brew a 4 gallon stout tonight (my first!) then split the batch once I move to secondary (3-4 weeks time) into four 1 gallon demi-johns.

The reason for this is I want to expermient with flavours.

I was thinking the following:

1 Gallon - plain
1 Gallon - Chocolate (steep in vodka for 10-14 days) + maybe a hint of vanilla
1 Gallon - Chocolate orange (Chocolate steeped in tangerine absolute vodka)
1 Gallon - Vanilla (steeped in bourbon for 10-14 days)

Anyhoo, two questions.

1) Is there anything glaringly wrong with my flavourings above?

2) How long would you leave these in the secondary - is there any danger of this going off / bad?

Thanks for your help.

TB

Oh wow, I've been thinking about doing this exact thing. The chocolate orange in particular has been floating around in my head. Sounds really good to me. I'd like to do a chocolate stout and then rack to 4 different fruits to see what I end up with.

Be sure to follow up on how these turn out!

Unless the stout in question is really sweet, the vodka notes are going to come through really strong.

Vodka has notes of flavor? Maybe if it's cheap-ass-grocery-store vodka...

This is interesting.

I certainly don't want any vodka flavour. I only have Absolut and Smirnoff (neither of which are top end....and have a very obvious taste to me). Would I be best off not trying to extract the flavour and just dumping into the brew?

So cocoa powder straight in?

The Vanilla and bourbon should be fine, as I'm happy to have both those flovours.