I am a pretty new home brewer- 2 five gallon partial grain batches under my belt. I'm getting ready to brew a brown ale that I will bottle, and would like to get a coffee flavor into some of the batch. I was thinking of bottling about 3 gallons as normal and then putting some whole beans in a hop bag in the remaining beer for a day or two before bottling that. Before I proceed I wanted to see if anyone sees obvious flaws. Should I sanitize the beans in the oven for a while at 150 degrees before cooling them and adding them to the fermenter? Thanks
Dry beaning (basically what you described) is the way I do it. I don't sanitize the beans and haven't had any problems.
I am gonna piggy back off of this since I have a related question...I have a stout fermenting now, and I'm gonna add some coffee beans next weekend. I've already decided on whole beans in secondary and just need to determine the amount now. Would 2 oz for five gallons for ~5 days be enough to get a pretty pronounced coffee flavor? I'll be using locally roasted coffee fresh from the source btw.
To repeat some advice I gave recently: Here is a recipe from @OldSock and here are the tasting notes. He used 1.75 ounces in a 5.75 gallon batch and detected "lots of coffee" character in the beer. Edited to add: 2 ounces sounds about right, if you want a really strong coffee flavor you could go higher. 5 days seems excessive, though, I would say 1-2 days should be plenty.
Depends on the coffee and your preferences, but if in doubt, taste after a day or two and then decide.
I coarsely crush my beans then add to the secondary. @VikeMan advice is right on. All coffees I have used give the coffee taste and scent differently, so 2 oz is good as long as you are sampling often. If you want a touch of coffee flavor use 1 oz and sample often. I find extraction time quickens with a coarsely ground coffee bean.
Funny you mention that, I actually was basing my amount off of his posts on his blog. I am going for a pretty heavy coffee character. I was inspired by a beer I had recently that had a fresh brewed coffee aroma exploding out of the glass. Sounds like I'll scale the amount of time back to around 1-2 days and stick to 2 oz of whole beans. Thanks for the tips yall!
I recently had success with just brewing up a whole pot of coffee using a full basket of a ground Sumatran coffee then cooling it and putting it in primary. Worked well and the coffee taste was just what I was looking for: strong! It was like 4loko but for adults and my heart was going into dysrhymias (JK)
