Flavour infusions deteriorating over time

Oxidation could be one of the causes, and just like trying to preserve a hop aroma, you can purge your kegs/bottles with CO2. To my understanding tea should help add (sulfates?sulfites?) that should help preserve the beer. As for the tea flavor, I don't know a lot about trying to preserve that. If I had to try to get tea flavor in beer I'd cold-steep the tea and add it in gently at the bottom of a purged keg or bottling bucket. I'd rack the beer on top and hope for the best. The same goes for coffee. Most of us have had best luck with cold steeping the night before.

Cold temps will help extend the shelf life of all your flavors and your beer. Hopefully that coffee flavor will hold up for the rest of your batch.

Cheers,

Chris

 

I find that certain flavor additions become muted during bottle conditioning. In my opinion, you may not be satisfied with your additions until you have the ability to force carb.

 

I agree with your assessment that it may be oxidation. I assume that by cold infusion you mean you are steeping the flavoring in cold water and adding the strained liquid to your beer? If so that may be where you are picking up the o2. You either need to use deairated water for this process, or just steep your tea, etc directly in the beer. I have found that steeping directly in the beer usually works best. I have never used tea, but with coffee, a cold water steep is a waste of time for an inferior result, adding whole beans directly to the beer is easier and yields the best coffee character.

 

Disclaimer: I've never made a beer with tea, but I do drink a lot of tea.

I think 2 days' steeping might be too long; you will extract more tannins, and these can precipitate out in short order, possibly taking some more desirable flavors down with them. I'd try a 2 hours to overnight steep in cold beer and adjust from there - you might need more tea for this schedule. Excluding air is always good; you can purge a jar with CO2 before adding the beer and tea. When making coffee beers, I've always steeped the whole beans for 1 - 2 days right in the secondary... less messing with the beer, therefore fewer things that can go wrong. My intuition is that tea would need less time than coffee, but of course I'm just guessing.

 

Is this about a day or two before you package?

 

Yeah, around 24 to 48 hours before packaging.

 

does anybody know if heat from chilis will stick around or will it fade like so many others?

 

It will stick around, at least for a very long time.

 

It'll hang out around a long, long time at the least. Having done 3 chili pepper beers, there is still heat at 12, 9, and 7 months respectively.

 

Hey Jack

Very flattered that you're interested in playing around along similar lines... It sounds like your process would have definitely introduced some oxidation... The moving from fermenter to jug and back-blending would be very difficult to control.

We add the tea to the fermenter at the end of fermentation and leave it warm for four days before cooling and dumping the tea. It actually kicks off a little more fermentation, which helps reduce issues around oxidation, and adds an extra half a percent abv. The first time we brewed it we expected it to be 6% and it kicked on through to 6.5%.

The second point of make is to ensure you use a really high quality tea, with actual leaves rather than bags. We use earl grey blue flower from "t leaf t" here in NZ. It's a beautiful tea. I thought I hated earl grey before I tried it, as I had only had supermarket earl grey tea.

Cheers
Stu
Yeastie Boys