I’m looking at Amahl Turczyn’s Dragon’s Milk clone recipe in the July/August Zymurgy issue. The recipe says to boil the wood chips and soak them in cheap bourbon for a week and then to toss the bourbon and soak them in good bourbon for 47 days. 47 days??? Did he mean to say 4 - 7 days???
Upon further review, the recipe in Zymurgy does indeed specify 4 - 7 days… The recipe in the AHA Recipe Archives is where the 47 typo exists.
Looking forward to giving it a try. Thanks for all your replies.
I would assume that it is a typo. The first indication that something might be the result of a production error is that it appears in Zymurgy. 
From the context I think it is 4-7 days. The first part of the recipe says to start the fermentation, and while you are waiting 10-14 days for it to finish to prepare the oak chips. If it took 47 days (an unusually precise number for a period that long), the recipe should have told you to prepare the oak chips long in advance of brewing the beer.
I used this technique to get some strong oak flavor into a stout last fall, and it worked great. My previous attempts had a lot of bourbon flavor but not much oak, and this gave me what I wanted.
It should be 4 - 7 days. Pesky hyphens… >:(