Adding flavors to Stout

[Bradhathcock]

Hello all,

I am doing a ten gallon batch of stouts and planned my flavoring in secondary. I wanted to split my ten gallons into 2 separate 5 gallon batches with different flavors. The issue I am running into is I want to do a coffee vanilla stout and a pumpkin coffee stout. I got the vanilla coffee stout down and am not worried about the flavoring. I am wondering how to get the pumpkin flavor into my stout using pumpkin spice. Do I need to do this before secondary? How much spice should I use? I see information for Ales but Stouts, the flavor might be tougher to pull through. Any ideas? Thanks for the help.

 

[Cyclman]

When it comes to using pumpkin spices, start small. A little goes a very long way.

 

[Leezer]

If you’re going to add the coffee as a cold brew, you could add the pumpkin spice to that until you get a nice balance of flavor in the cold brew, then add that to secondary, or even primary. I’ve found a little spice goes a long way, and same for coffee.

 

[tracer bullet]

Check if your spices are water soluble, oil soluble, etc. I think the spice to the coffee is a good idea, give it a try and drink that before commiting the batch. There are extracts as well, who knows, maybe this is an acceptable time to be lazy and just add a few drops of extract. Whatever you do be slow and careful!

 

[BalloonGuy]

I used this in a brown ale a couple of years ago. Pumpkin Spice Extract, Natural - Apex Flavors As mentioned a little goes a long way. I used 4 ounces- 2-3 would have been better.