I’ve been wanting to try this for some time. I mixed about 25 ounces of old Rasputin with about 1/8 of a cinnamon stick, some vanilla extract, a lil bit of brown sugar, and Wild Turkey bourbon. I had it last night and it was awesome!!! I did this for fun and I really loved the end result. Has anyone tried something like this? Am I crazy? Here are the ingredients and how I did it: 25 ounces of imperial stout, I wanted to try old Rasputin as it is an exceptional easy to find imperial stout. Basically, I used two bottles and about 2 ounces. 1. and ½ ounces of Wild Turkey Bourbon 1. table spoon of brown sugar 3/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract 1. Sliver of cinnamon stick 1. 750ml clean fliptop bottle. I used an old XS Rouge ceramic bottle First of all I placed the cinnamon stick in boiling water for a few minutes. I then let it dry and placed it aside to cool down. I mixed the bourbon, sugar, and vanilla extract together. I then slowly poured two cold Old Rasputin 12oz beers in to the clean XS ceramic flip-top bottle. Then I poured the bourbon mix into the flip top bottle and placed a long narrow sliver of the cinnamon stick into the bottle, finally I filled the rest of the bottle with about another ounce of Old Rasputin. I closed the fliptop and placed it in my refrigerator for one week. I gently rotated the bottle every day that week. When pouring the beer into a glass I used a small coffee filter so that I wouldn’t get any of the cinnamon splinters in the beer, the filter got rid of some of the head but there was still a good ½ finger of kaki head in the glass!! I have heard so many times that once you open a bottle of beer you pretty much have to drink it right away. From my experience as long as you pour beer straight from the bottle into a fliptop bottle, I mean all the way to the top of course, the beer can be refrigerated for a few days. I wasn’t trying to recreate any beer out there and this is not a poor man’s version of any barrel aged stout. I just wanted to try it. I loved it!
Good on ya. The other day I did a Alesmith speedway stout coffee pressed for one hour with a 1/2 bean of vanilla. I then took a 4 oz snifter and a bottle of rum. I took a straw out and inserted into the rum bottle. Placed my finger on the straw to capture the air/liquid and inserted into the snifer sideways. Rotated the snifter 3 times to get a good cover all around the glass. Then poured 4 oz into the glass to make my version of the Jackie O's Vanilla Bean Rum DA. Cheers!
Experimentation is what brought us great beer to begin with, so I am all for this type of stuff. Even if it wasn't that good, sounds like you had some fun doing it. On the plus side, it did sound like it was damn tasty. One thing I will mentioned is that boiling the cinnamon stick probably took some of the flavor out of the stick (I am not sure if that was your intention or not), but it would have had more cinnamon flavor if you had just dropped the sliver of the stick in as is or if you heated it up gently in the bourbon so that it's flavor went into the bourbon as opposed to the water which you disgarded.
That actually sounds pretty good. I think I will add the cinnamon stick to the Bourbon next time instead of directly in the beer, this way I can tell if there are any splinters and I will not have to use a coffee filter. The beer was actually pretty awesome!! I've had my share of good barrel aged stouts Parabola, KBS, Older Viscosity, etc, so I can tell that the bourbon mix I added made this beer taste really good and not disjointed in any way. Thanks for the suggestion! Cheers!
that's way too much bourbon in that little bit of beer, IMO. This would be the equivalent of dumping nearly 2 gallons of bourbon into a barrel of beer. Barrel aged beers would not pick up this much bourbon from barrel aging. But if you loved it, gratz! I would use maybe 1/2 an ounce of bourbon instead.
Sure they would. A freshly emptied barrel has at least a couple gallons of liquor trapped within the wood. From what I've heard/read, it's fairly common in Tennessee to "sweat" the liquor out of freshly emptied bourbon barrels by leaving them in the sun and rolling them around every day for a few weeks.
