This month’s Fermentation Friday topic (hosted by Northern Table) is:

My topic is all about liquor… and how you use it in your brewing! Have you infused a beer with liquor before either to blend with the flavour (port infused stout as an example)? Have you had a good example of this? Do you think brewers should be doing this at all? If this is something you have done before how did you go about doing it?

We’ve used spirits in our homebrews just two times. Both times, we used whiskey, and both times, it was used in conjunction with oak. We tried using both scotch (Johnnie Walker Black Label) and bourbon (Wild Turkey).

The first time, we decided to take the term “scotch ale” quite literally. We soaked 2 oz American oak chips in 8 oz of Johnnie Walker Black Label. We poured the oak chips along with all 8 oz of scotch into the secondary fermenter, racked, and let the scotch ale sit on the oak for about two weeks.

The result was, well… I personally hated it. The scotch character was extremely overwhelming. To me, it barely tasted like beer. Tim tolerated it well enough, though he’s more of a scotch drinker than I am. But in my opinion: Fail.

The second time was for an oak-aged Imperial stout. This time, we soaked 2 oz American oak chips in just enough bourbon to moisten it. Again, we stuck it in the secondary, but this time we only let it sit for a week.

This experiment turned out a bit better. The bourbon flavor was much more subtle, so it let the flavors of the actual beer shine. Unfortunately, I think the oak was a bit much. The oak character lessened as it aged, but still, we weren’t too happy with it.

Next time we try to make an oak-aged Imperial stout, I think I would use only 1 oz of oak chips. Soaking the chips in the smallest amount of bourbon (or scotch) possible is a good idea, in my opinion. I’ve had some really good examples of bourbon porters/stouts, and the key in all of them was the subtlety of the bourbon flavor. If I wanted my beer to taste like liquor, I’d have a car bomb!