"PieOPah" <Simon.Argent@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1134721821.073287.231630@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...[color=blue]
> How have your beers turned out when you add the extras? This is
> something that I have tried with a semi-success....
>
> I also use kits and tried boiling up my water with a variety of spices
> (cinamon, mixed spices etc) in a large cotton teabag like way. Once the
> water had cooled, I added this to the wort. Once the beer was ready to
> drink it tasted fantastic and really christmasy, justthe way that I
> wanted.
>
> WHile over the last couple of months I have been 'sampling' this beer
> (over half the batch gone now) I have noticed that the great taste of
> christmas appears to be dissappearing :( Although I haven't tasted any
> for about 3 weeks now, I do know that it will no longer have any of the
> fantastic flavour thatI brewed it for :(
>
> How have you added the extras and have the flavours lasted at all?
>
> I did have the same problem with a stout, except in this instance, when
> kegging, along with the priming sugar, I poured in a bottle of Ginger
> Wine. Again for the first couple of weeks this had a fantastic ginger
> flavour to it which slowly faded over time. The only thing that has had
> any lasting effect was a stoutt hat I added a few pots of freshly
> brewed coffee.....
>[/color]
I'm afraid I've taken a very simplistic approach to this so far and added
the extras directly into the bottles for secondary fermentation. The only
batch I've done it with so far was with cider because I had some extra that
wouldn't fit in my cornelius keg. I put about 4 cloves in some bottles, a
cinamon stick in another, cinamon and cloves in another and dried chilli
flakes in another. The clove cider was lovely. The cinamon was not as
obvious a taste but it was there. The clove masked the cinamon in that one.
When I opened the chilli one it frothed about 1/3 of the grolsch bottle and
what remained looked like a chilli show storm (like the toys?). Think a tea
spoon of flakes was overkill. Had a few friends round when we opened it and
we all had a mouthful - very hot but quite amusing! We ended up using it as
a dip for our munchies while we drank some more homebrew!

I have a couple of vanilla pods that I am going to try something similar
with next time. Ever since coke came out with a vanilla version I've
thought I should do that with beer. I'll report back when I've tasted the
results.

As for how long the taste lasted - unfortunately the bottles of cloved cider
were a victim of their own success and were drunk within a couple of weeks.
I'll try to scale this up to a 3 gal corny keg and see if that lasts a
little longer!

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Keith

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