Barrel Aged Beers and Pricing

All I'm saying is that without a named distillery the consumer has no idea where the bourbon barrel comes from, the quality of the bourbon that was in those barrels, if the bourbon in those barrels met the requirements for domestic consumption, or even if the spirits in those barrels met the commonly accepted definition of “bourbon”.

If your brewery puts out a bourbon barrel aged beer why not tell folks whose bourbon was in those barrels?

I can easily picture a brewery that wants to produce a BA beer, but can't afford Jim Beam or Old Grand-dad barrels using cheaper barrels from the distillery that makes Jim Beem and Old Grand-pa for export to Asia and SA.

 

I agree this should be standard practice but at least part of it is some brewers probably use barrels with no real name recognition and if your customers are willing to buy your product simply because you call it BBA and don't ask questions there is no need to complicate the situation. Breweries that get a hold of really desirable barrels usually list what they are aging in

 

If we lost a barrel, for us that would be a loss that we would eat. If a bottle of beer is worth $20, it’s not suddenly worth $40 because half of it was lost. That said, it’s rare that one barrel would be contaminated and it wouldn’t affect the whole batch of barrels. It does happen on occasion, but it’s not normal. We basically never have a lost barrel in that manner due to having cold storage for our barrels so bacteria and wild yeast are very unlikely to present themselves and we pasteurize our bottles, so if a beer was contaminated but not displaying off flavors, it gets pasteurized and there’s no issues. A lot of breweries age at whatever ambient temperature and that can get quite hot and then there’s a lot more potential for issues.

 

Sometimes the best barrels for beer actually come from cheap bourbon. Think about a pappy barrel that has been aged for much longer than other bourbons, the whiskey has already “stripped” most of the barrel character and that whiskey is very valuable so the distillery gets every ounce out of the barre that they can. A cheap whiskey on the other hand might not be worth the additional effort to get the last bit out so it’s left unto see and there’s still much more character to the barrel itself. But tell people you age in a pappy barrel and tel them another beer was aged in a Jim Beam barrel and which one do you think customers will be more likely to turn up their noses at?

 

Thanks, that makes sense.

 

Is this price drop local to you (New Mexico)? Or have you seen this in other locations as well?

I personally have not noticed a decease in prices of Barrel Aged beers in my area.

I am tempted to opine that perhaps barrel aged beers have decreased pricing in your area(s) due to folks not willing to pay 'top dollar' for Barrel Aged beers.

Cheers!

 

Well, some breweries do this for some of their brands. The recently released beer of Lagunitas Willettized Coffee Stout comes to mind.

I would posit that another challenge could be that for a given beer brand barrels of multiple 'types' may be utilized since the brewery is unable to obtain a necessary amount of barrels of the same 'type'.

Cheers!

 

SN, Oskar Blues, Founders, Victory, and Lagunitas all come to mind with narwhal, tenfidy, CBS, Java cask, and willetized moving from large to small format resulting in a significant drop in price per ounce.

 

Weedy (@honkey), will you please provide further details on the process you utilize to take your barrel aged beers to being a final product. I assume that you blend the beer from multiple barrels to create a more 'consistent' product, is that correct? What is your methodology for blending? Do you select from a handful of barrels and select based upon your tastings of the handful of barrels (e.g., I think that barrels A, C, D and F will 'work' together well)? Have you ever just decided to blend all barrels together?

Cheers!

 

You have experience with BA Narwahl, in the same format, decreasing in price? If so, can you please provide the details here?

I have purchased Lagunitas products (Westified, Willetized) over the past few years but those prices have not decreased for me via my local beer retailers.

Cheers!

 

No, I specifically said that the lower price came from moving to a smaller format container. Narwhal in 16 oz cans is significantly cheaper than in 750 ml bottles.

 

FWIW I never purchased these beers in the larger format (since I universally viewed large format bottles as a rip-off).

All of my purchasing of Barrel Aged beers has been on non-large formats and I have not seen any prices decreases in those beers.

Cheers!

 

I make very few exceptions to my no large-format bottle policy, but there are some I feel like I just need to try. I also have not seen a drop in price for small-format offerings, there are just a heck of a lot more of them as more brewers recognize the shrinking market for large bottles. I was very happy to purchase a 4-pack of barrel-aged narwhal for what I feel is a fair price.

 

Was that a recent purchase? What was the price?

Cheers!

 

I bought it on Saturday for around $20 at a distributor outside of Lancaster.

 

It depends on the beer. Normally every barrel aged beer for us has 4 of one type of barrel and 1 of 4 different types for a total of 8 barrels. The 4 barrels normally get blended together unless I taste them and think of something that I think would make it better, then I split the batch into 2 sets of 2, one set being released as the base barre variant and the other as the flavored variant. Occasionally we will taste the single barrel variants and decide to blend two together or recently we took all of the “left over” beer from 5 variants and blended them together. That was about 15 gallons each (all RIS) of bourbon, cognac, maple, vanilla, and sea salt.
Really it’s a game day decision when I taste the barrels what I will ultimately do with them.

 

You can picture it, but it doesn't exist.

 

What kind out stout did you make that used sea salt? Sounds interesting

 

It was a sea salt barrel that I filled with our Russian Imperial Stout. The beer straight from the barrel was over the top salty, but blended down to 1:2 sea salt to bourbon barrel, it was really nice. Just like in food, the salt enhanced the other flavors present in the beer. That was especially notable in the blend of all the variants.