Adding Lavender to the boil

Hi,
This is my second home brew (third if you could Mr. Beer) and I decided to do a summer ale with a little Lavender added toward the end of the boil with the spices. I've looked through the forums and searched and didn't find anything one the subject of adding spices. Does anyone know what amount of extra spice to use or what NOT to use? Again, if this is already posted somewhere just point me in the right direction.
Thanks,
Joe

A friend and I just made a brown ale with some lavender in it. It was his beer, his idea, I'm trying to get him into brewing so donated him a fermenter and told him to just pick out a kit. I'm not keen as I don't like lavender flavoured anything that much. We made a LME 1.5kg cheap brown ale kit up with 80:20 DME:sugar and substituted the yeast for Danstar nottingham. Blanched about 30g of dried lavender from his garden in water just off the boil for 5 minutes and added it to primary along with 30g of pellet fuggles.

Initially I thought it was too much. Had concerns about it overpowering the beer. The lavender aroma has dissipated over the last week or so and now it simply smells like beer. I won't know what it tastes like for a while though.

I found mention of lavender beer online with google. Typical concerns were based around contamination, not boiling it due to extracting weird flavours, using the 'wrong' type of lavender, adulterated pot purée inedible things etc and simply adding too much and overpowering the character of the beer.

Thanks for the info! I will keep it in mind when I try this next brew.

I wanted to come back and say that I visited this friend and his brew a couple of days ago and we took a sample and decided to rack this to a secondary. First of all, our impressions were possibly soured by the fact that the krausen had pushed the lavender up into the neck of the fermenter where it had dried out with a blob of yeast, making it look like the beer contained a clutch of weird insect eggs, but overreactions aside it wasn't that nice.

Lavender flavour is very noticeable, I admit that I'm not a fan, but the guy making the beer who is a fan even finds it too noticeable and overpowering. So we racked it, hopefully it'll settle down as it dries up and calm a little in the bottle, but at this point it isn't going to be an easy drinker. He described it as soap. I described it as brown ale with lavender in it which is pretty much what he aimed to do.

Be careful with lavender a little goes a long way. I made a two gallon lavender pale ale. I used one tablespoon and it was way too much.

I've been reading a lot about lavender and beer and it seems you are right. A little goes a long way. I'm boiling the Summer Ale now and I'm having second thoughts about the lavender. I'm thinking the citrus in the summer ale might lighten the flavor a little. I plan on using only two TBS of lavender and only in the last week in the secondary.
Thanks for all the info!

Be careful with lavender - not that ive tried it but many will find it tastes like soap. This is due simply to lavender being overused in soaps. If I were to try it out, I would probably add it to the secondary and let it soak for a bit, assuming the alchohol would draw it out. Also i would think it dissapates after a while so you wouldnt have to worry too much about that if you added it before bottling. But yeah, I would say to use sparingly.

Hi,
I just wanted to let everyone know that the Lavendar Summer Ale was a big hit! I added just a Tablespoon of ground fresh lavender to the secondary a week before bottling and it was perfect! I started with Brewer's Best Summer Ale so it had a nice pale alish flavor. I really liked it. Thanks for all the help!
Jaybird.