Beer Forum

I recently brewed a bourbon vanilla porter and added 1oz of medium toast oak cubes for 3 weeks. The oak flavor is really overwhelming, reminds me of fresh sawdust. Will the oak flavor fade over time or shall I call it a learning experience and dump the keg?

You gotta blend this with other non-oaked beers and come away with the oak product you were shooting for- or dump it.

Not a fan of putting good beer after bad. Don't know what happened here... Tastes like I dumped an oak forest in there. I may save a couple of growlers worth to blend back into a clean batch.

I have had an oaked beer standing around waiting for the oak to fade. It does fade but very slowly, so my advice would also be to brew the vanila porter again, but this time without the oak and then blend the two. Maybe ½keg oaked to 1 full keg non-oaked would do the trick.

I did the same with an ESB, 2 week on oak. Flavor did fade, I was tasting pretty often to see if there was a change, but that style is not one for aging long term so I decided to slam the last of it in one night, which lead to a call in for DOTW : )

What was your batch size? If it was 5-5.5 gallons you will be just fine. Give this beer some time to age. I have found that at about 3 mos, the oak starts to meld nicely with the beer. 1 oz is really not that much especially for a dark style beer with some roast in it. Be patient, let it age, don't touch it and you will be greatly rewarded at a later date. Oak will fade, but you must be patient. It always seems overpowering at first.