Bonks 1st Question - Secondary Fermenting

[bonk]

Hi All,

I've been trying to come up with a way to add vanilla to my porter without causing or reducing the chance of it getting spoiled via to much head space or infected by nasties.

my method at the moment is to put it in my small keg with a few spoons of dried malt to do a small ferment and purge the keg hoping to getting the oxygen out and leave it with just Co2.

with the vanilla i try and soak the beans in vodka to kill anything (this time round i had no vodka and tried some boiling water to kill anything on the beans) and add them the the keg to let them add flavour.

how ever it seems that i still have trouble and last night when i went to bottle the beer had a suss looking white spots on top. i tried the old leave a bit behind method and bottled hoping its not going to turn into vinegar.

So, after all that whats a safe way of adding herbs, flavours and other things to the secondary.

ideas i've had are,

• when bottling use a good vanilla extract to give it the flavour i want, add to the bottling bucket and go from there
  
  transfer to the keg under a sealed system, using a relief value from craftbrewer to allow the beer to replace the keg full of co2?
  
  buy a glass demijohn or a smaller fermenter to reduce my head space?
  
  give up adding vanilla to my porter ?

thanks guys and gals for any ideas

 

[Maple]

• when bottling use a good vanilla extract to give it the flavour i want, add to the bottling bucket and go from there I've used this approach
  
  transfer to the keg under a sealed system, using a relief value from craftbrewer to allow the beer to replace the keg full of co2?
  
  buy a glass demijohn or a smaller fermenter to reduce my head space?
  
  give up adding vanilla to my porter ? not an option in my book
  
  Why not add the bean(s) in the last 10 minutes of the boil

thanks guys and gals for any ideas