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It depends on how long you leave them in the beer. Manufacturers of various oak products - cubes, beans, staves, chips, spirals, powder - sometimes mention how long it takes for them to give up everything they have. The lower the surface-to-mass ratio is for your cut of wood, the longer they'll last. I.e., staves last longer than cubes last longer than ...

More beer has a great guide on taking care of oak barrels which covers cleaning, sanitizing, etc. The overview is: keep it filled so that it doesn't dry out and use a sulfur-dioxide mixture to sanitize. The oak will soak up some of the beer over time, so brew a little extra and keep it on hand to refill as the level goes down. You should also remember that ...

I've seen a great picture of an oak table leg sticking out the top of a carboy. Wish I could find it. BYO covered this question in depth. So I won't plagiarize everything here. Oak Essence and Powder Oak Chips Oak Cubes Staves and Spirals

I don't know much about oak use in beermaking, but in winemaking, Frech oak is prized for giving a less "oaky" flavor while providing more tannins. American oak contains a higher level of vanillins and imparts a stronger "oak" aroma. Hungarian oak is also often used in winemaking. I don't know anything about it. I imagine these characteristics are taken ...

I think relying on the supposed wild bugs in the wood naturally is generally a bad way to go. You've already done it "right" by pitching an appropriate brewing Brett strain you got from wyeast. So go ahead and steam your oak cubes first. You want to give the bugs you put in there on purpose the best chance at being the predominant character in the final ...

Put the chips in the carboy until you have the amount of wood-flavor you want and then rack the beer over to a keg or bottle it. You'll pull all the flavor you want out of chips pretty quickly (2-4 weeks, probably) because of their large surface area and thin-ness. Once you've done that, there's not much reason to leave the beer on the chips, so get it into ...

I have a recipe for Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter that's very popular. I add the bourbon post fermentation, pre bottling or kegging. I pour 4 2 oz. samples of the beer and add a different measured amount of bourbon to each. After tasting them all and picking the one I like best, I scale that amount of bourbon up to the batch size. I find this makes an ...

The problem as I see it here isn't so much getting the chips out of the carboy, but how to separate the chips from the beer without too much effort. Because if the chips were in an empty carboy you could just tip it upside down and shake them out with a few good rinses of water. I'd invest in a small CO2 system and then plan to rack the beer under closed ...

With things like cubes and chips, I've found that it's best to just throw them into your BBQ right before you put the meat on after they've been used in your beer. If you think about it, you've conditioned them with wine or bourbon prior to use in your beer. There's not a lot of surface area there, so they're probably mostly spent by the time they've ...

There could potentially be a transfer of water between the air and wood if not kept in bag (e.g. controlled environment), but I don't know if this matters. Moreover, white oak anatomy includes closed tyloses which are cells that resist water and rot and are why white oaks are used in cooperage. I don't imagine there would be much loss of functionality ...

What I would do is a) add the chips in secondary and b) when you brew the beer put some test samples of chips into water at different amounts and leave it for two weeks in order to judge an appropriate amount of chips to use. I put 1g, 2g, 4g and 8g of chips into jars of boiled water and used these to judge the amount needed for the batch of beer and racked ...

In Japan sometimes Sake is aged in Cedar barrels, I know of some beer makers (Cigar City) who also age in cedar. I'm sure other woods can/have been used for beer as well as wine but oak is the most dominant because it is particularly well suited to making barrels that won't leak. From a home brewing/winemaking perspective there's nothing stopping you from ...

You can reuse them several times, but each time you will need to wait longer to get the desired effect. Consider that Rodenbach brewery disassembles their oak vats between batches and scrapes some wood off them. You have the benefit of being able to taste the effect and remove the beer from the oak when you've reached the level of oakiness you want. You ...

I like a heavier toast than the french oak chips my local brew store sells, so I soak them in Chardonnay (for IPAs) for a couple of weeks and then toast them dry in the oven (10-15 minutes at 350º or so). The Chardonnay might not have enough alcohol to fully sanitize them, but it adds a great subtle flavor to oak-aged IPAs. 350º is hotter than a wort boil, ...

If you want to avoid adding the alcohol flavorings from bourbon or whiskey, I would jsut steam them for 10 minutes. Get a good rolling boil going with a steamer in the pot, toss in the chips and once the steam refills the pot I'd take them off the heat. The hot steam with still sanitize, while the slow reduction in heat will help minimize the tannin issues ...