My wife has informed me that I should brew a "caramel, vanilla, hazelnut beer".  Apparently, she saw some flavorings in that William's Brewing catalog?

This seems like a scary proposition. 

I'll send you some beans. I just ordered and received a huge pile to make more vanilla extract.

To me it makes more sense to add vanilla as an extract. alcohol is a much better solvent than beer will be, so I don't see how adding the beans to the beer gives you any advantages over extract. Compare this to something like coffee where you use water as the solvent so beer has advantages like having alcohol as an additional solvent.

I guess you could always add beans and then use extract to goose the flavor if needed.

VanillaproductsUSA?

The first batch I used gormet grade A beans. This time I'm using extract grade B beans. I hope this batch is as good as the last. The last one was sublime.

How many beans do you want Olan? There's a pack of three already wrapped and sealed here if you want that or I can separate out some more.

On Amazon vanillaproductsusa Is my supplier. Great quality based on the first batch.

And yeah, just cut em up, scrape the caviar and dump it all in cheap but quality vodka. 2oz-4oz beans per pint of vodka depending on how strong you like your extract. 4oz is close to the double strength stuff pastry chefs use. They recommend to sanitize everything so I do that, but I doubt it's necessary. Once it's bottled, shake it up, then shake once a day for a week or two and then shake every week for a month or two then shake when you feel like it for between six months and a year. You can use it when it starts smelling awesome (a month or so) just try to pour around the caviar and chunks. At six months+ you can pour it through a coffee filter or paper towel to clean it up and bottle it in little bottles or put it back in the same bottle.

Then you dry out the beans and then put them in some sugar to make vanilla sugar.