Vanilla beans..Flavor fading

[vsusinga]

Hi. Does anyone happen to know a trick to keeping vanilla flavor from fading? I just recently tried my Dreamsicle wheat i brewed last month. I used an ounce of dried orange peel and saphir hops in the boil, and fresh orange peel in secondary along with 3 vanilla beans. I did as suggested and cut up the vanilla beans and scraped out the seeds. Dumped all that in with the orange peel. I tasted it after doing a gravity reading and the vanilla flavor was too subtle, so i soaked a couple more beans in vodka foe several days and dumped that in a few days before bottling. I just tried one after being bottled for a week and the orange really comes through great but there is absolutely no vanilla flavor. I think thats strange considering i used 5 vanilla beans. Any suggestions?

 

[Murphy111]

Use all five in the secondary next time - vanilla is a delicate flavor to begin with, so a lot of orange could easily cover it. If you want more, try a (high quality) vanilla extract. Vodka will suck some of the flavor and aroma out, but a good commercial brand will be much more potent. Make sure it says "Pure Vanilla Extract," or something along those lines. A cheap variety won't be any more help than the beans-in-vodka trick.

 

[vsusinga]

Use all five in the secondary next time - vanilla is a delicate flavor to begin with, so a lot of orange could easily cover it. If you want more, try a (high quality) vanilla extract. Vodka will suck some of the flavor and aroma out, but a good commercial brand will be much more potent. Make sure it says "Pure Vanilla Extract," or something along those lines. A cheap variety won't be any more help than the beans-in-vodka trick.

Thanks murphy. How much extract do you think i should use per gallon?

 

[Murphy111]

Depends on how powerful you want the flavor. I would start with between one-half and one tablespoon per gallon, that'll probably throw a decent flavor when combined with the beans. If you want more just dial it up as you go along.

 

[vsusinga]

Would u reccomend using the extract and leaving out the beans ?

 

[Murphy111]

The beans will provide more aroma that you'd probably miss with the extract alone, which will mainly contribute to flavor only. You could reduce the number of beans, but I wouldn't recommend omitting them completely.

 

[Murphy111]

Have you retried this recently? Or gotten satisfactory results?

 

[FarmerTed]

Vanillin (the main component of vanilla flavoring) is an aldehyde. They are easily reduced to alcohols by yeast during fermentation, so I suspect you're just losing that flavor due to the bottle conditioning. I've never used vanilla, but I have oak aged beers, and seen the vanilla character disappear in the bottle. I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do about it.