Spicing a Christmas ale

[Cazamodo]

Just wanted to see your guys ideas on spicing for a wi nter ale. I've never spiced a beer before, other than a Wit and just wanted to know when you usually added the spice.

I plan to not go too mad, and I'm only using orange, cinnamon, and vanilla to spice it. And hoping the grain bill and yeast will give a fruity malty flavour I'm after too.

Now I have a few different spices, I have cinnamon extract, and also ground cinnamon. Vanilla extract, and then just whole jaffa orange sat the moment.

I was planning ot peel the oranges and throw the peel + cinnamon in the last few mins of the boil. But then I thought I could use the extract in the secondary, along with the vanilla extract.

Then It also occurred, could I just score the oranges and dump them in the fermentor too, to save peeling them all.

[leedsbrew]

Have you thought about making a tincture with the slices and then adding them to the secondary?

You could make a tincture for each spice and blend them together to suit your tastes, or just make one tincture with all the slices!

A quick google and there are loads of hits for making spice tinctures. You could then use a dropped or small syringe to dose say a half pint drawn off from primary to get your dosing correct. Add a drop at a time, smell and taste it and keep adding drops at a time until you reach the point your after.

Obviously this can be a bit time consuming bit you get better control of your final product rather than adding to the boil. If you over do any if the spices in the boil, there ain't no correcting it.

Also it's worth noting that some of the aromatics and volatile compounds would be scrubbed out and blown off during fermentation.

Just my 2p

Cheers

LB

[lord.president]

I boiled all my spices. Couldn't taste any of them. Whacked half a jar of mixed spice in the FV for 3 or 4 days,in a muslin bag. Wish I'd simply done that,rather than shelling out on whole spices.

[Cazamodo]

Yea after a bit of reasearch thats exactly what I shall do. The only thing going in the boil will be the orange peel, and thats only to steep at power out

[DeGarre]

I boiled my spices for 15 minutes, orange peel, clove, and cardamom.

5g cardamom into 24 litre batch, just having a test bottle to test the carbonation and I can especially smell and taste the cardamom, very strong even though it was boiled. But I used S04 instead of Belgian yeast so it could be that the yeast is not masking the spice.

[Baldbrewer]

Hi I steeped spices in vodka then added that to bottling bucket and swirled!
I steeped 1cinamon stick, 1/2 clove head, 1/4 grated nutmeg and 15 g of dried ginger in 60mls of vodka for a couple of weeks.

Three weeks after bottling the predominant flavour is the heat of the ginger with the cinnamon coming in secondly, no clove or nutmeg present.
Testing a bottle a week until chrimbo to check progress , well that's my excuse

It was a Chrimbo recipe with cinnamon,ginger ,nutmeg and clove added in last 15 mins of boil.
Also a pound of honey was added during boil, currently sits at 6.8%