Oak Aged Brown Ale

How long did you end up leaving it on the oak?

 

What kind of oak did you end up using? This is helpful, as I'll be aging an English mild on oak and have never really used oak with a lower abv beer before. I'm thinking 1.5 oz of american oak for 1.5 -2 months should suffice.

 

I've used both cubes and chips, but will likely never use chips again. It left a real mess in terms of much very fine silt-like sediment, that was very difficult to remove from the keg (took a lot of "pouring off"). Although chips work faster, they are messy.

Cubes add more flavor, but there is a trick not often - if ever - mentioned. The 'caramel' flavor is hidden deep inside the cube, and it takes a long time before that flavor is extracted. What I do is cut each cube in half (I simply use a hammer and chisel - which works very efficiently). You get more than 30% additional surface area, plus the cubes are half as thick and can be penetrated more readily. This extracts the flavors from inside the cubes much more quickly and efficiently. In this way you get the advantage of both chips and cubes (more speed and more flavor) without all the mess that comes with chips.

Cutting each half in half again might work even better, but I haven't tried that yet.

It worked great for me when I made a Rodenbach clone.

 

I'd cut that amount in half. 1.5oz is more than I'd use in an Imperial Stout/Porter.

 

last oaked stout I made used 4.2 oz of similar amounts of medium and heavy toasted oak for 4 months. It was super really oaky. definatly tasted like ass until it was 6 months old then rapidly started coming around. at 9 months it was just super.

 

did it taste like @Lukass?

 

@MrOH i have no experience with that taste, must be you do , so,,,, what are the discriptive words one would use for that???

 

...maybe Pinocchio's ass?

 

Beats me dude, you said it tasted like ass, figured it might as well taste like @Lukass ...