All Grain Brewing Question

[GREM]

Hi all,

Been brewing all grain on the "Ruby Street Brewery" system using "Beer Tools" with a co-worker for about 4 months now. We've brewed 9 batches so far & #9 is force carbonating in a Corny Keg on 12 lbs of C02 @ 40 degrees after a week in primary & two weeks in secondary. It's a 5 gal batch of Southern English Ale. Target gravity was 1.041 & spot on. FG was 1.011. We added a few Cinnamon sticks to it during the last 15 min of boil, but we suspect the oils might have vaporized leaving a slight cinnamon taste; but not enough. We'd like to add a touch more cinnamon before bottling from the keg in another week or so; but have concerns about sanitation & not sure how to go about it. Any help would be appreciated.

I put together a video from some clips of our brews so far & uploaded it to my homepage. Here's a link...

http://gallery.me.com/landres#100444

[slothrob]

I've never used cinnamon, but after a little research, it looks like brewers add it in a number of different ways, with adding it at the very end of the boil or adding it dry to the beer after fermentation both being popular.

Since you are kegging, you can probably add it dry and not worry about potential contamination, or at least bottle bombs.

Brew-Your-Own magazine had an article that recommended making a tea, boiling some water to sanitize it and drive off the oxygen, then adding some cinnamon to the water as it cools to sanitize it and make a tea of the spice, pasteurizing it.

One nice thing about adding it to the finished beer is that you can pour a beer, add cinnamon to taste, then scale the amount that you like to the full batch. 1/2 teaspoon/5 gallons seems popular for cinnamon.

[GREM]

One nice thing about adding it to the finished beer is that you can pour a beer, add cinnamon to taste

[/quote]

I heeded your advice & added a few drops of some herbal "Cinnamon Liquid Stevia" to a 12 oz pour from the keg & it tasted like the fake sugar used to sweeten coffee & teas. Great idea on sampling one beer first! Luckily the rest of the keg still tastes like beer so I'm going to order some real Cinnamon extract & try that.

The whole idea of adding a few drops per beer makes me ask the next question. If I were to find a taste I like using the "per beer" method, couldn't I use the "Beer Gun" to fill each individual bottle to taste? Couple drops of extract, purge, fill, purge,& cap...Something like that.

Thanks

[slothrob]

The whole idea of adding a few drops per beer makes me ask the next question. If I were to find a taste I like using the "per beer" method, couldn't I use the "Beer Gun" to fill each individual bottle to taste? Couple drops of extract, purge, fill, purge,& cap...Something like that.

Sure, you would have the option of flavoring the whole keg or just flavoring some individual bottles and keeping the rest of the beer unaltered in the keg.