Vanilla Bean anyone?

Beer Brewing- We are in the midst of brewing the Donnie Darko Stout. We decide to add a touch of vanilla flavor to this stout. Matt had some vanilla beans that he had intended to add to his cherry vanilla porter before the carboy crack and we lost the porter. I had never seen a vanilla bean before and just assumed they looked something like a coffee bean. Nope, they are long skinny beans as seen in the picture below. My cell phone is used a reference for size.

When you cut open the bean there is a mushy black compound. If you have ever bought real vanilla bean ice cream you see dark specks in the white ice cream. That is the inside of a vanilla bean. It smelled delicious!

We added the vanilla beans to two shots of vodka. The vodka helps extract the vanilla flavor so it blends better with the beer.

Here is close up of the vanilla beans in the vodka. We planned to add this to the beer the following day, but this container had a slight mishap and was knocked to the ground. We are currently waiting for more vanilla beans to arrive to re-extract some more vanilla flavor.