Barrel Aging: When is it necessary?

I KNOW RIGHT!

 

while there isn't an abundance of straight forward information on the matter, i tend to think kzoobrew is correct. for starters, a Heaven Hill barrel 10 years old may have spirit in the 150pf range (75% alcohol) upon dumping. to get that high from the legal entry limit of 125pf, would indicate the barrels experienced a lot of cycling, which means there would typically be a ton of juice absorbed in the walls of the barrel on top of the spirit & charcoal you'd find at the bottom of a spent barrel. i think it's reasonable to assume a barrel aged beer can pick up a couple of percentage points. p.s. standard American whiskey barrels are 53 gallons not 60.

if someone cares to make sense of the chart, not sure, but maybe this would give a clearer answer. i'm too tired to try:

http://alcbevtesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/alcoholdilutiontable1.pdf

http://www.pharmcoaaper.com/pages/T...ing_water_amount_req_reduce_alcohol_proof.pdf

 

This ^

 

Barrel aging doesn't make a bad base brew good, that's 1st. 2nd a good base brew aged in a Bourbon/Whiskey/Cognac barrel can add tremendous depth of character, and add some complexity of flavors to enjoy. Speedway stout not barrel aged is a tremendous stout IMO, I can imagine how good the BA version would be.

 

Regardless of the size I know that most distilleries do thier best to get as much out as they can.
I know of several that dump more than one.
So of course if there is a shit ton of leftover liquor in the barrel then yes the alcohol would go up. just math really but I have been to a few distilleries that ship the barrels only slightly wet.
The alcohol increase is not that much.
Yikes this is getting too nerdy for me
tastses good!

 

Said no one ever.

 

Eclipse: Meh
BCBS: Awesome

 

Did you know that some plastics can be up to 10% water by weight? If you put them in an inert atmosphere or vacuum they will slowly lose that water over time, coming into equilibrium over time.

Similarly, depending on how much alcohol the barrel absorbs you could get pretty significant increases. Using Highbrow's number of 150 proof (so 75% alcohol) there would need to be 1.7 gallons of spirits absorbed in the wood to bring the alcohol concentration of a beer from 10% to 12% (assuming a 53-gallon barrel and no other source of spirits). Is that reasonable? I don't know, I can't find figures for how much water oak is capable of absorbing. The first source I found on whiskey barrels says they weigh 125 lbs, so this would be an expansion of ~10% in their weight, which doesn't seem unreasonable to me given how porous wood is.

Of course, maybe it's totally wrong and dumb, I really don't know. But I've heard that beers increase a few percent in alcohol content from barrel aging from many sources, and it seems pretty plausible to me. Maybe someone on BA actually KNOWS.

 

"just math really". so never mind the size, everything else said is accurate??

dump more than one - what?

what are the names of these distilleries & what does only "slightly wet" mean exactly? can you describe any method you personally know the distillers you speak of employ to retrieve spirit from the walls of barrels?

 

i'm not a scientist, most people in the whisky industry have trouble sticking to a singular explanation as to how American whiskey gains proof. they all seem to agree water is getting out of the barrels faster than alcohol through cycling. after that it gets murky & sometimes down right ridiculous. for example, some claim a alcohol molecule is thicker/less permeable or other engineered terms than a water molecule - so the alcohol doesn't pass through the wall as easily.

anyhoo i already said i'm not a scientist so that disclaimer is covered. given the agreed upon process, it would not surprise me if the spirit coming back in from the barrel's walls has an even higher abv than the spirit that was dumped. i said a 10 year old HH barrel might be in the 150 range because i've actually sat down to sample barrels for a private Evan Williams Single Barrel purchase. 1 sample was about 139pf the other 7 or 8 were 146pf+

 

I am a scientist, but the wrong kind, so in some ways I'm more dangerous. But I do know that larger molecules will diffuse more slowly through something, and ethanol is larger than water, so that's actually somewhat plausible. I'd be interested in an explanation of this too.

Could be, I just picked a number. It doesn't really matter as a proof of concept for someone who's skeptical, slightly different inputs will make slightly different outputs, but the overall conclusion doesn't really change.

 

as stupac2 said, that's one explanation, but another is more obvious and overlooked: humidity, which controls the direction and preference of the diffusion. in humid conditions, you'll have more alcohol evaporation from the barrel, and on a dry, hot day, you'll have more water loss (or, like you said, cycling). the relative progression of these cycles over a few years is what drives the final proof of the whiskey. i imagine the same is true of beer.

patrick rue, when asked about black tuesday, said that past barrel-aged beers had shown an average of ~3% abv pickup from barrel-aging; they use a hydrometer reading for the base beer and estimate the same pickup to obtain the final abv of black tuesday. (but this was a few years ago; maybe they're actually springing for gas chromatography now.) and they're better funded than a lot of other breweries... i am sure some element of guesswork is involved in deriving the final abv of a barrel-aged beer. for example, the lcbo tested angel's share a while back and found upwards of 15%, whereas the bottles claim 12.5%.

/and thus ends my being useful for the day

 

i realize now my wording was kind of a run-on, the molecule example is not one of the ridiculous assumptions.

i hear ya' - i just didn't want it assumed that i pulled the number outta' my @$$.

we didn't mention it, but this certainly isn't overlooked on my end. i believe heat is a big influence, & going a little off the beaten path, i suspect some distillers maybe misusing it trying to artificially speed maturation to some degree. there was an example of a barrel of whiskey that shot past 164pf (almost 20% more alcohol by volume than the original barrel entry proof). it was later discovered a steam pipe had ruptured directly behind the barrel.