cinnamon and vanilla in the secondary fermenter

[leebrunconti]

I've already brewed some rauchbier and want to incorporate vanilla and cinnamon it the secondary fermenter. What is suggested, soaked in vodka or just sanitized and added (spliting the vanilla beans first)?

 

[jdauria]

I did a pumpkin ale recently and soaked the vanilla and cinnamon in vodka and then added liquid too. Better to be safe then sorry as the vodka will sanitize them!

 

[Jacinthebox]

i did the vodka soak on the split and scrapped beans...then added the vodka and all to the secondary

 

[johnsocool]

How much vodka are you guys using

 

[BrewOClock]

The vanilla can be a bit overpowering if you split it. I usually use 2 beans unsplit for a medium beer and for a heavy brew like an imperial, it will usually be a single split with an unsplit Madagascar bean.

 

[jdhowe]

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.