title_body: Adding Spirit Essences to home brew beer
upvoted_answer: First, congratulations on getting bit by the homebrewing bug!  
  
  Yes, you can actually drop bourbon/scotch/whiskey into your fermented beer to add that flavor. Why after fermentation? To make sure you don't kill the yeast before they do their job. The hardest part is getting the right spirit to blend with the beer you're making. Darker beers tend to hold up to spirits better because of the unfermented dark roasted malts and robustness that off-set the alcohol you're placing in them. Dropping bourbon in a sour would probably be a waste of time, effort, and good alcohol.  
  
  Homebrewers more commonly use "other" ingredients to impart other flavors to beer that might not be approved for commercial use. Brew Your Own has a section called Mister Wizard that addressed a little of this in one of the responses. This should kind of give you an idea of the "mad scientist" aspect of homebrew beer additives.
  
  
    The same is true if one chooses to add oak chips to the secondary fermentation. After I got the brew where I wanted it with respect to beer flavor, oak flavor and aged flavors, I would begin to play with adding the wine or spirit component. This type of blending is always best done by preparing several samples of beer with varying levels of blended mixtures so that the flavor impact can be tasted over a range of concentrations. You may find that even a little of the planned flavor additive makes for a vile brew and you can avert a disaster.
  
  
  However, the easier and more repeatable version (albeit more money than most recreational brewers will care to spend) is to buy a bourbon barrel and let your beer age in them to absorb the bourbon-y goodness. Dragon's Milk and Sexual Chocolate are two solid mentions (in my opinion).