has anybody used a pressure cooker to sterilize secondary additives (e.g.fresh fruits, powders, spices, etc)? does it affect flavor or consistency of the additive? im going to add peanut butter and cocoa powders and was going to jar it and use a pressure cooker.
I wouldn't. I'd use a pasteurization temp 160-180 for a minimum amount of time to try to preserve aroma with fruits and spices. Some people add additives to the boil, and that would be fine with the ingredients you're working with.
Pasteurization is ok. You don't want to get fruits over the low 160s or you end up with some pectin haze in your beer. You don't want to hit spices with that much heat either because you'll drive off the essential oils and other flavor components. You might as well just add it during the boil. Peanut butter is going to add some fats to your beer...
Peanut butter flavored vodka fortification? They make it - http://www.nutliquor.me/home.html Says "Blended to taste like the center of a peanut butter cup, NutLiquor contains no peanut allergens and was created to be enjoyed neat. " I've also seen PB&J vodka.
Which doesn't mean it was made with real peanut butter or that the fats were not removed -- it's very easy to do that with liquor. You also aren't concerned with head retention with vodka.
I'm not really sure if you are saying it's a good or bad idea - actually your double negative laden statement confuses and infuriates me. If it wasn't made with real peanut butter, there probably would not be any fats to not remove. And by not remove, I mean... . If you are not in the all natural camp, and are just after the flavor, seems like it would work. I wonder if something like this one already in powdered form could also be a good option. One of them already have cocoa powder (though also sugar and salt). Here is a thread over on HBT regarding said powder along with mention of peanut butter liquor. Maybe the powder isn't all that great. More on topic, could the pressure cooker actually separate the oils from the PB? That could be helpful.
The powder works great if you only rack on top of it for a short duration. I did a peanut butter and chocolate (TCHO Nibs and Chocolate) milk stout using the PB2, which tasted incredible 48 hours after being racked into a secondary (peanut powder then added after beer), but after 96 hours it started to pick up a tiny bit of a fatty/off flavor. Will be rebrewing it this weekend and will be racking on for 48 hours before kegging.
That's good info. I wonder if you could simply rehydrate into a slurry and pour it into your primary. Then just rack to secondary or keg after the 36-48 hours (so you don't have to bother racking twice).
Unfortunately the PB2 turns to paste when you rehydrate, however I haven't tried warmer water or more water than recommended for turning it into peanut butter... Will try it out with a little bit and see what kind of H2O volume I'll need to get it into a slurry, if that works, it is a much better idea than having to rack twice.
Depending on how much PB you use it may not be that big of a deal. Any time nuts are used in a beer you're going to get some of the oils left in the beer but I've never seen a pecan beer, for example, with bad head retention or rancid off-flavors. You also may not care about head retention enough to worry whether the PB destroys it or not. So I'm not taking a position one way or another except to point out a potential issue. I'd be suspicious about using the liquor in a beer because there are some chemical and biological reactions that could make the artificial peanut butter flavorings likely used turn into something unpleasant. Yeast can metabolize some chemicals and the presence of ethanol can turn some chemicals into ethyl compounds that may not taste right. There's only one way to know for sure -- try it out -- but I wouldn't commit a big batch of beer to it until I had tested on a smaller batch. I tried using amaretto in a beer once, thinking the almond flavor would complement a simple brown ale. It didn't. The yeast fermented out some of the sugars and the flavor was transformed into something that wasn't completely vile but also not something I care to drink again. I don't think a pressure cooker would make help the fat issue. Oils/fats liquify in heat so pressure cooking them would just mix them up. Cool temperatures cause oils/fats to congeal. Think about if you've ever put soup or gravy in the fridge. The next day you end up with solid chunks of fat. I guess you could liquify the peanut butter in the pressure cooker and then try freezing it to separate and freeze out the fats but I don't know how well that would work. The most reasonable method if you wanted to use actual peanut butter would be to find the organic stuff where the oil and butter separate in the jar. Normally you want to mix them together to obtain a spreadable PB but in this case you could just drain off the oil leaving you a low fat PB. I guess you could drop it in the pressure cooker if you wanted although I'd probably just sanitize it in some vodka or grain alcohol to prevent boiling off any flavor compounds. Otherwise you would probably be ok using that powder.
