I’ve read about dry beaning coffee where you add coarsely cracked beans to the secondary, but I wonder is there some way to sanitize them without using vodka or destroying the coffee flavor? If so, how? My beer is estimated at 5.1 ABV.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
I never have and have never found it necessary.
You could put them in the oven for a short time. When I put cacao nibs into a stout, I first put them in the oven for a short time. 300 degrees for about 12 minutes. Just spread them out on a cookie sheet. I don’t recall ever hearing about this being done with coffee though. May give your beans a more roasted flavor.
I think it would be unusual for anything bad to live on roasted coffee beans. I have always coarsely crushed them and added them in a permeable bag to the fermenter or the keg.
I have always used about 1/4 cup whole beans in a hop sack dangling in the kettle about 5-10 minutes before the end of the boil. Adds a wonderful coffee background without adding any color. The more coffee you use, and the longer it dangles, the more coffee flavor. No cracking and no need to sanitize.
I never sanitize the beans. I just put them into the secondary. I have never had a problem doing this. The alcohol in the beer will kill anything residing on the surface of the beans.
Secondly, I do not crack the beans, I just add the whole beans. You will extract the flavor from the beans but not as much caffeine as you would get from cracking them.
The ph of fermented beer and the alcohol present make it very inhospitable to anything that might spoil your beer.
Yeah. If I was guessing, I’d say more pH than alcohol.
Very interesting article on coffee beers from craft beer.com.
It’s tough to get an infection from coffee beans unless you are leaving the beans exposed to some reckless conditions. Coffee roasts hit their peak above 400F so the beans are coming out of the roaster pretty clean. In most cases they are going from the roaster to packaging line to a fairly clean bag and then you are probably scooping right out of that bag into a clean vessel to weigh and then adding it to the beer. I won’t say the beans are microbe free but there should be so few organisms on the beans that the probability of an infection coming from the beans to the beer is slight after accounting for ph, anaerobic conditions and ethanol in the beer. If you leave open bags of coffee where you mill grain or create some other way for more hearty organisms to populate the coffee beans then you should sanitize those beans.
Most dried ingredients are safe to use without any type of sanitization. Aside from wild yeast and stuff like standard kitchen bacteria, beer spoilage bacteria mostly becomes an issue when it builds up over time in places where it thrives: Such as wort and beer or similar mediums. Dirty hoses, fermentors, racking canes, aeration stones … stuff that comes in contact with wort. Not all micro organisms are beer spoilers. For instance, your beer can’t catch a cold!
Even in the case of fruit picked straight off the vine/tree I have added these to finished beer and not really picked up any majorly weird infections (assuming the beer is relatively dry). On occasion some interesting wild yeast and sour flavors will occur but I can’t recall it ever ruining the beer.
That’s definitely an interesting article. I wish they would go a bit more into the roast profile Jeff has used to successfully eliminated the green pepper flavor. Even though I probably wouldn’t be able to replicate it at home, I might be able to find a local roaster who puts out something similar.
Perhaps you could talk with a roaster. I think it is likely they know what you are looking for. Or maybe willing to work with you on something as a test. After all, we likely don’t need a lot of it.