I purchased the 5 gallong NB Surly Bender kit. I want to add coffee, cacao nibs, and vanilla bean to it. Any advice as to when? How much? and how long to do it for? Example would be that Surly says their coffee bender sits on beans for 24 hrs.
Throw them in the secondary, preferably in a mesh bag. With the beans I would slightly crack them and use about anything above 2 ounces, depending on what flavors your looking for. For the Nibs, I wouldn't use anymore than like 3 ounces. Keep them in for a couple days and taste. I would leave for about a week.
I have 4 oz of nibs and 2 full vanilla beans, too much? How many ounces of coffe beans would you reccomend?
I've done this very thing with NB's Bender kit. I used 4oz of nibs and wished I would have only done 2oz. It totally overwhelmed all of the delicious subtleties of Bender's malt bill. So I would recommend starting with 2oz - you can always add more. I added 2 vanilla beans, which I thought was perfect and not overwhelming. For the coffee, I made a cold brew extract with 1/2 lb coarsely ground beans in 24oz of water. Great coffee flavor with no bitterness. Here's a great link summarizing various methods of using coffee - http://www.thebrewsite.com/coffee-beer-week-coffee-in-homebrewing/ As for amount of time, I've found vanilla can sit in the secondary forever without becoming overwhelming or creating off flavors. If you use coffee extract, time isn't really an issue. Not sure about other coffee methods. I noticed the nibs impart most of their flavor in the first few days, so I would use this as the last addition and just keg/bottle whenever the chocolate flavor is dialed in to your liking.
Thank you very much for the info! One last questions how did you add the vanilla beans to the secondary? Just drop them in whole in a straining bag?
Cut down the length of the beans and scrape the pulp out, then put both the pulp and the scraped pods in a straining bag.
