Here's my conundrum. I don't have a full day to brew my 15 gallon batch until a month from now and the beer needs to be done in 2 months. I want to add oak chips to the fermenter; however, 3 weeks of soaking oak chips wont give me enough oak flavor I want. Any ideas on what I could soak the oak chips in 1 month prior to brewday, and just add that liquid to the secondary? (sanitized water, refrigerated wort, ect.) Or techniques on extracting the flavor from oak chips more quickly? Thanks in advance
I always use vodka to soak my oak chips. Though i generally put the chips in the secondary and only a little of the liquid.
You could add more oak chips, although I generally think this lends more of a lumber flavor than the rich/complex spicy-vanilla-toasty character that oak aging does when done right. Maybe use bourbon to soak the chips (it is already pretty oak on its own) and then add the whole thing to the beer. That should help.
A local brewery needed to push an oak-aged porter out in under a month and they used (according to the brewmaster) a ton more oak than "normal". I enjoyed the beer, but I would agree with OldSock that it gave a different character, and perhaps "lumber" is the correct way to describe it...
Maybe you could start to oak some water now, use that to brew and maybe get some deeper vanilla flavors from the wood?
One question would be packaging. I assume that you're going to keg. Will there be an issue to have oak in the serving keg? If not then it's even tougher.
