I'll be brewing a Christmas/winter beer this weekend, shooting for a chocolate mint stout. The plan is to brew up an imperial stout, age on cocoa nibs, and then add mint at bottling. I've never used mint before so I planned on utilizing either a tincture (from vodka) or boiling water and making a tea with fresh mint and adding this extract to taste. Does anyone have any recommendations, or any pros and cons, between the two?
This has come up before a while back. Maybe a search using "mint" may be fruitful. I vote tincture. Dose a bottle with a predetermined amount of mL, pour on top, and scale it up from there.
Thanks. I've searched the forums previously for using mint, but none of them address the advantages and disadvantages of a tea vs tincture. Given my first time using mint, I want to steer clear of using it in the boil. I plan on dosing just as you described. Cheers.
I've tried both methods (but not with mint), each will bring out different characters of the flavor. Try them both ahead of time and see which you like.
I'd say tincture. Mint teas are often weak on mint and grassy tasting. Maybe look into some mint extracts.
I have not done this before, still fairly new into brewing however I have over 7 years in the food industry Johnson and Wales trained to boot. If I were you I would try to sanitize shorty in vodka, not long enough to extract flavor. Next try bruising the mint with a sanitized mudle or other similar tool (think mojito). This will release the natural oils as well as the chlorophyll and flavors of the mint without loosing flavor or quality due to steeping in hot water or incomplete extraction from tincture. Try splitting the batch up and giving all three methods a shot. Who knows you may find the new best way to infuse herbs to beer.
I did similar with my mint-wine experiment. I split the mint leaves into 2 batches, bruised/muddled the mint, and half went into a tincture with vodka and half into a tea with boiling water. The tea was poured into the fermentor after about 5 mins, and the vodka tincture after about a week*. This was then fermented w/ added cane sugar for about 3 weeks to ~9% ABV, bottled and matured for 6 months. End result was... weird. I have trouble describing it, but the closest I can get is imagine if you had ginger ale that had a mint flavour instead of ginger, but without the sweetness of soda, or the "menthol"-ness of mint. Anyway, I guess the point that I was rambling towards is that if you want the fresh/menthol/mint aspect, you may not be happy with using plain mint leaves. It will give you a mint flavour, but you might want to look into getting some mint essence also? *The tincture was done a week early so that both this and the tea went into the fermentor at the same time
I agree with machalel. I made a mint tincture with vodka for a stout. Roughly 2 oz fresh mint leaves I let soak in a baby jar of vodka for a few weeks. It did not taste like mint. I added it to several bottles in various amounts and none of them were good or "minty" in any way. As pointed out above maybe your best bet is to get some mint essence.
Brewing my first version of a "winter warmer" this weekend and I am making a tincture of one cinnamon stick and one vanilla bean in aged rum. This will be added after primary fermentation slows down. The cinnamon stick will be pulled out before then, my fear of making a Red Hot beer is making me go light this time around.
