Home of the BrewNosers

Has anyone tried adding liquers or such, to a batch of beer before bottling? I would think you'd have to add it after primary fermentation. Basically right before adding priming sugar(if that's what you do). I was thinking about trying to make a hybrid beer by adding port or sherry to a batch. I have no idea what style would best suit this(if any). It might just be a waste of an expensive alcohol, I have no idea.

I've added bourbon to a stout before. I didn't bottle that beer though I added to the keg. I used the bourbon to extract some of the wood flavours from wood chips. Didn't pick up the wood but I could taste the bourbon. Definitely not the nuisances of the bourbon just that there was something added to the beer that tasted of hard alcohol. Like when you add bourbon to coke.

You're best off pulling a measured sample and using a syringe or dropper to taste test at various concentrations. Figure out what you like, and scale up from that for the whole batch. Add after fermentation, but beware if you are adding something with a degree of fermentables, you'll need to account for that in your priming calculations. Also think about what the relative increase in ABV is. I can't imagine you running into this problem (usually a little goes a long way in terms of flavours with bourbon, etc.), but in theory you could go above the tolerance of your yeast strain. In which case you'd want to add a more tolerant strain to help with carbonation.

As for getting an idea of what works and what doesn't, if you've got a liquor cabinet, start playing around with adding tiny amounts of various thing to beers you've already got or beers you've bought. If you find a flavour combo that works, make a batch!

Careful if you try to add any type of cream liquor to your beer. Years ago I heard that Garrison added Baileys to their winter warmer, so I decided to try to clone the beer. When I added the baileys to the beer in the secondary, it instantly curdled! I eventually cleaned the beer up and got it bottled, but it was a mess!

My batch for the imperial round of the Stillwell Open last year came in just under 7% and I wanted to bring it up so I added a 375ml bottle of Grand Marnier to the 30l keg. It punched up the citrus flavors and the alcohol quite nicely. I did have the advantage of knowing it was going to be kept under refrigeration from that point until serving though, so I didn't have to worry too much about additional fermentation.

mumblecrunch wrote:My batch for the imperial round of the Stillwell Open last year came in just under 7% and I wanted to bring it up so I added a 375ml bottle of Grand Marnier to the 30l keg. It punched up the citrus flavors and the alcohol quite nicely. I did have the advantage of knowing it was going to be kept under refrigeration from that point until serving though, so I didn't have to worry too much about additional fermentation.

Just out of curiousity, how do you calculate the ABV of something like that?

Icedpyre wrote:

mumblecrunch wrote:My batch for the imperial round of the Stillwell Open last year came in just under 7% and I wanted to bring it up so I added a 375ml bottle of Grand Marnier to the 30l keg. It punched up the citrus flavors and the alcohol quite nicely. I did have the advantage of knowing it was going to be kept under refrigeration from that point until serving though, so I didn't have to worry too much about additional fermentation.

Just out of curiousity, how do you calculate the ABV of something like that?

(beer volume * beer alc%) + (liquor volume * liquor alc%) = (final volume * final alc %)

and you can rearrange to:

final alc % = (beer volume * beer alc%) + (liquor volume * liquor alc%) / (final volume)

example, based on aaron's posted info (note that it would be off by a bit, because the keg likely didn't have precisely 30L in it before adding the grand marnier)
final alc % = (30 L * 6.9%) + (0.375 L * 40%) / (30.375 L) = 7.3%

CorneliusAlphonse wrote:

Icedpyre wrote:
Just out of curiousity, how do you calculate the ABV of something like that?

...math...

example, based on aaron's posted info (note that it would be off by a bit, because the keg likely didn't have precisely 30L in it before adding the grand marnier)
final alc % = (30 L * 6.9%) + (0.375 L * 40%) / (30.375 L) = 7.3%

Exactly this. We figured between being slightly under the 30l and being between 6.9% and 7.1% depending on the equation used, that single bottle would get us in the vicinity of 7.5% which was good enough for government work, anyway.

On one hand, the winning beer that night was under 7%, so apparently I needn't have worried, but at the same time I did learn something from the experience. e.g., the calculation above, as well as the impact a fairly small amount of liqueur (1.25%) can have on a keg of beer.