I'm looking to add cinnamon and vanilla at bottling (of an imperial stout), extracted into bourbon.
I'm considering taking the following approach:
Soak 3 vanilla beans (split/scraped) in 4oz bourbon for 1+ weeks.
Soak 2 cinnamon sticks (whole) in 4oz bourbon for 1+ weeks.
Pull a sample of the beer before bottling from the primary, add flavored bourbons separately to taste, and scale up the addition commensurately to the remaining batch (5gal total).
I'll follow up with how this worked, but for those with experience with this sort of approach already, I have a few questions:
Is this soak long enough?
Is this enough bourbon to use for this flavor extraction? Too much? Too little?
Basically, I'm worried that these flavors could both be really overwhelming if done incorrectly, so I want to be able to tweak the relative amounts of the flavors and have sufficient flavored bourbon to add to the batch. I have no experience with this yet, so I figured I should check in here about the viability of this approach.