Can you soak oak cubes too long?

[bacchusmj]

Alright, on my last brew day I started a robust porter i planned to secondary with oak chips soaked in bourbon. After an epic fail of a brew day I got about 55% efficiency and what should have been a 1.066 porter is more of a brown ale. Instead of aging the beer for 2 months Im thinking Im just gonna toss it in a keg and get rid of it.

On that brew day, I took 2 oz of medium oak and tossed it in a sealed Mason Jar with about 14 oz of Eagle Rare. Its now been in there for about 2 weeks. Im thinking I may take another shot at the porter in about 2-3 weeks.

Is there any reason I cant just leave the jar with the bourbon/oak in the fridge for the next month and just use it when Im ready?

I dont want to waste the bourbon and I cant see any risk of bugs in pure bourbon. Plus I figure the bourbon just spent 10 years in oak, 2 months wont hurt will it?

TIA

 

[bacchusmj]

I said oak chips in the first post, they are oak cubes. I think that makes a difference since Ive heard chips can break down over time.

 

[aiptasia]

Your cubes will be fine, but they will be heavily saturated in bourbon. When you do eventually add them to your beer, make sure you taste test it after about four days after adding them to your beer. Keep tasting samples of the beer every day until it juuuuuuuuust starts to taste like too much oak/bourbon, and then rack the beer off the cubes and/or bottle it.

Whatever you do, DON'T toss oak cubes (even moreso for chips) into a beer and just say, "The recipe says two weeks" or "I'm gonna let it sit in there a MONTH!"

no... No. NOOOOO! Leaving it on the oak without tasting it is a recipe for disaster. You can definitely over-oak your beer very easily. I've done it and to fix the problem in my pineapple barleywine, I had to let it sit in a case for over a YEAR and a HALF for the oak flavor to fade out of it enough to be drinkable. Right now, it's at about two years old in the bottle and the pineapple flavor has magically re-appeared.

 

[Talonracer67]

Putting your oak in Bourbon for ANY length of time won't "hurt" it, you could have it in there for 10 years. It is correct that Bourbon is aged in oak (actually white oak) but is it charred (that's how you get the color of bourbon) and you are using raw or toasted oak. Still won't matter a lick. And if you are adding bourbon, you don't need to soak the oak. just toss the oak and bourbon in.