Give some of your darker, higher ABV and sour beers the barrel aged treatment with these bourbon barrel oak chips. Secondary fermenting your beer with oak chips will add toasty and smokey notes of vanilla, caramel and coconut. It will also add smoothness.
The amount of chips required is down to personal taste and the style you're brewing, so it's worth experimenting. Recommendations range from 20g to 80g per 20 litres. We used 80g for a 13% Imperial Stout which worked very nicely (see video here).
How you add the chips is also down to experimentation. We favour soaking in bourbon for 72 hours to sanitise and then adding loose rather than in a bag to maximise the surface area exposed to the beer. We've also seen people boil with water and make a tea which is added rather than the chips themselves.
For more information on barrel ageing beer you might enjoy this video of our visit to The Barrel Project (part of London Beer Factory).