Oak to a sour brown

I just wanted to update because I just opened the first bottle of the oak beer I mentioned above. It's still needs to carbonate more in the bottle, but it's turning out well. On the first sip, the oak exploded late with a really nice amount of warm vanilla. Definitely toasted wood in the nose, too.

It's a 7% rye porter so there's gotta be a lot of oak flavor to come through. It went from April 1st to June 1st (no math = 2 months) just sitting on the oak cubes in secondary.

After 2 months, I'm not even sure more time would benefit. However, I am currently soaking the left over oak in a jug of water and still getting flavor from it.

 

@calir1 I know you posted this a while ago, but I thought I might be able to add some input from my experience. I recently just bottled my sour that sat on peaches and medium toast French oak cubes soaked in a bottle of sauvignon blanc wine. I used .75oz of cubes that I boiled for 2 minutes then discarded the water (to help remove some of the tannins). I then soaked those cubes in an entire 750ml bottle of the wine for 2 months. I then added the wine and cubes to the secondary with the peaches and let that age for 4 months. I do not get any oak presence at all nor does anyone else that has tried the beer. This was a 5 gallon batch. So you may want to up the amount of cubes that you use. I went with .75oz because when I used oak chips I was using .75oz and it was quite noticeable, but I know the cubes impart less flavor in a shorter time than chips due to surface area. I wanted a slight oak presence in the sour, but didn't want it to be to noticeable. If I were to do it again I would try 1oz-1.5oz per 5 gallons and maybe not boil them.

 

Maybe you might want to try like 1-1.25oz first? you can always taste before bottling and see if its where you want it. If its not you can always add more, but you cant take it away if you over do it.
So maybe do 1-1.25oz in one jar soaking in most of the wine. Then take a second jar and maybe put like .5oz in that jar with enough wine for them to soak in. Then if the first addition isn't enough, you can just dump in the second addition and let it sit for like a week. If you start the jars at the same time, the second jars liquid should extract a nice amount of oak flavor while the first jar is already in the beer and aging. Just some food for thought there for you I hope this works out for you and please write back with an update when you can. Cheers!

 

I usually go for the long exposure. I don't really think you can "over-extract" oak, it's more of an adding too much oak. The bulk of the initial extraction is pretty quick. The thing I don't like about oak additions is that pencil shaving character. I get it a lot from spirals, which I use a lot more than cubes, so I don't know if cubes put off a lot of that. With spirals, you get this pencil shaving character pretty quickly, then it goes away after about 6-9 months, and you are left with some nice tannic structure. So I usually go with one spiral (no soaking) right after primary fermentation (2 oak spirals if the sour beer is more aggressive), and let the beer bulk age on the spiral. I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, just the way that I do it. I've never really been happy with oak barrel substitutes in sour beers though. They just don't reproduce true barrel character IMO. Oak barrels go through a 2-year curing process in which a lot of vanillans and other compounds are created, and I am not sure that is completely replicated in cubes/spirals.

 

^^^ Also, this.

Nice to see you here, Dan. I know you're busy with MTF, but it's great to get your $0.02 on subjects like this. The wiki done yet?

 

Is this the same with stouts? I oaked an imperial stout which a bottled a few months ago. It only had the oak for about 5 week IIRC, but it has a very intense character from the oak that I think could be described as pencil shavings.

I'm not really sure why I oaked that beer. I don't even like oaked stouts. I'm dumb sometimes.