Oak has been used for centuries to make wine barrels. For some spirits such as whiskey, bourbon, and brandy, aging in oak barrels is essential to increasing the complexity and intensity of flavors. Many things can influence how the aging process works with oak, including toasting the wood. Also, you can’t just use any oak you find down at your local hardware store - it has to be a particular variety. After researching how home brewers use oak in making their own spirits, we got adventurous and have made some oak blocks to use in our vanilla extracts. The blocks are the perfect size for a pint jar and you can get them in three flavors: light, medium and dark toast. We have tried them in our vodka-based extracts and found that they mellow the flavor after just two weeks. Aging using the oak blocks seems to take away some of the bright boozy flavor. Each block is approximately 1 ounce and made in-house using our proprietary preparation methods. Here’s how we suggest using the oak finishing blocks: Put an oak block in a pint jar and cover with finished extract. Please leave the beans out at this point. Let soak for 2 weeks. You can go longer if you like, but from what we’ve tasted, it only takes about two weeks to do its magic. We found in our tests that you could stick the blocks in a second batch of extract but they were only about half as effective on round two and then no longer do anything for batch three. After use, You can just let them dry off on the counter. They make great scent blocks now for your undies drawer!
