Substituting ground or liquid flavors for steeped whole flavors - vanilla beans, cinnamon sticks, all spice and vanilla ?

[brewman !]

Hi.
I'm trying to brew Gordon Strong's Holiday Prowler Christmas beer. Holiday beer recipe

It calls for the following to be steeped in the last part of the boil:

4 cinnamon sticks
1 nutmeg seed
1 vanilla bean
7 allspice berries
8 coriander seeds
2 nectarine peels

Due to COVID, I have:

- ground cinnamon instead of cinnamon sticks
- vanilla extract instead of vanilla beans
- ground allspice instead of allspice berries
- dehydrated sweet orange peel instead of nectarine peels

How much of each of the substitutes do I add to my boil to approximate what the original recipe called for ?

When do I add them ?

Thanks !

 

[IslandLizard]

4 cinnamon sticks.
I'm pretty sure you can use cinnamon powder instead of sticks. Now the sticks need to be boiled or better, steeped for some time, while the powder gives off it's flavor much quicker, so timing will be very different. Maybe add the powder after fermentation?
If you can get real cinnamon sticks that's preferred Whole Foods used to have them in a small 4-6 oz jar. They are very thin, rolled up, light brown, curled up bark shavings, forming a labyrinth of many thin layers.
What's mostly sold as "cinnamon sticks" is actually Cassia, a whole different species. Those are easily recognized and stand apart from true cinnamon, as they come in 1/16-3/32" thick bark curls. They're much darker peels, curled up only once or once and half.

1 Nutmeg seed. That's about the size of a Robin's egg, but brown. I guess that gets steeped for some time. You could probably add some shavings, after fermentation, instead.

1 vanilla bean. Madagascar are the best ones but almost unobtainable anymore, but there's nothing else like it.
You can get them on Amazon ($$$) or from some good spice store or maybe Wegmans. They need to be fresh, specialty packaged to prevent them from drying out, and losing much of their unique fragrance. They need to be scraped, cut up, and steeped for a week or 2 in a jar with Vodka or higher proof Everclear. Then add the potion, pulp, and pieces to the bulk aging vessel/keg/secondary.
True extract as used in baking won't do it as much justice, but may work.
The imitation extract is an ester, a chemical compound, linear, no complexity.

7 allspice berries. Powder is fine too.

8 coriander seeds. Easy. Only use the Indian kind, slightly oblong balls. Do not use the round ones, they taste like celery.

2 nectarine peels. Yeah, got me there. Maybe your supermarket? Wegmans or Whole Foods? Call around.

 

[IslandLizard]

As I said, the form the spices come in determines when and where in the process they need to be added for most contribution.
It's hard to gauge how much to use when using substitutes for the recipe ingredients.

You can always add more later to taste, but you can never remove what's overdone.