Spice tincture for sour beer

[The M]

Need some advice from fellow homebrewers. I've gone through some threads here concerning making your own spice tincture. I'm planning to add some blackberry and either raspberry or cherry puree into my next 6gal fruit sour batch. I'm also thinking of adding some vanilla, cinnamon and maybe cardamom to the mix.

My plan was to add about 8oz of good quality vodka to the mason jar with two sliced vanilla beans and one cinnamon stick. Might add some cardamom too but I have no idea what would be good amount? Gonna shake the jar couple of times a day and let the spices marinate at least for a week. I'm not sure should I add the tincture straight into fermenter at end of the fermentation or pour it straight to the serving keg. And will I get enough flavor and balanced spice profile with two vanilla beans and one cinnamon stick? Any thoughts? I would appreciate any help or tips since I have no previous experience addding spices to my brews. Cheers!

 

[Jag75]

I normally add tinctures right before I keg. That cinnamon might over power your vanilla beans but not sure , it really comes down to your taste buds . If you could soak longer then a week you'd get better extraction.

 

[The M]

I normally add tinctures right before I keg. That cinnamon might over power your vanilla beans but not sure , it really comes down to your taste buds . If you could soak longer then a week you'd get better extraction.

Thx for your reply. Couple of questions. Do you mean that you add your tincture into the FV or keg? And would it be wise to scrape the vanilla seeds out of the pod? About the soak time, I sure can soak a bit longer. Do you think that two weeks would be enough?

 

[Jag75]

I add mine to my fv because I dont have a syringe and tubing to push through the gas post. Yes , you want to scrape the beans . The longer the better . I try and do 2-3 weeks .

 

[The M]

I have to revisit this one because I'm little bit of confused. I did soak one cinnamon stick and two vanilla beans (scraped) for 2 weeks in 8oz of vodka. The tincture was indeed quite strong on cinnamon but I also got decent vanilla notes out of it. Dumped the whole tincture to FV with Blackberry puree six days before I kegged the beer. The beer has been now been conditioned for three weeks and I still don't get any cinnamon and only very subtle vanilla notes here and there. I trying to brew this one again in couple of weeks with different fruit but I'm not sure what should I change with my process so I could get more spice flavors out of the brew. Should I dump the tincture straight to the keg, should I prepare more than 8oz of tincture, should I add the tincture to the FV during fermentation? All comments are highly appreciated