Not dark barrel aged beer?

Not sure if you're a fan of sours and wild ales, but there are a ton of not dark barrel aged sours and wilds. Some really great stuff!

 

Allagash Curieux is a Jim Beam barrel aged Tripel. It's really good. You can also find various wild ales and saisons which are often aged in wine barrels.

 

Picked this up a few weeks back and absolutely loved it



Bourbon Barrel Aged Belgian Style Golden Ale. At first it wasn't my thing but as it warmed, oh man was it delicious. Absolutely fantastic.

 

Not sure if you get them down there, but Innis and Gunn make some nice barrel aged beers that are lighter. Not super light, but certainly on the lighter side of a scotch ale. The rum barrel one is my favorite:
http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/10272/39258/

 

Barrel Aged Barleywines are great, too. Firestone Walker Sucaba and Goose Island BCB are two of the more common ones.

 

burton baton by dogfish head is oak aged I believe and it puts a nice spin on an imperial ipa

 

Sours may be your best bet.

 

Many saisons are aged in oak barrels or wine barrels. Crooked Stave barrel ages everything they do, for example. River North does many varieties of BA Imperial Wit... lots out there. ...and then there's lambic.

 

Technically Tennent’s Beer Aged with Whisky Oak is not a barrel aged beer. Below is from the Tennents website: http://www.tennentswhiskybeer.com/

“How The Beer Is Made

Tennent’s Beer Aged with Whisky Oak is the culmination of four hop varieties – Zeus, Summit, Tettnang and Aurora. It is brewed using a complex recipe of three types of locally sourced Scottish malt and the pure waters of Loch Katrine.

The Tennent’s Brewing and Fermentation process takes a minimum of three weeks. It incorporates the process of warm maturation and the ageing of the beer in Speyside Single Malt Whisky infused oak chips.

After fermentation and oak ageing, the fermented beer is repeatedly re-circulated over the chips before it is stored in a maturation vessel where the oak, vanilla and whisky flavours imparted during the ageing process continue to mature.

The end result is an approachable yet complex beer, which offers a memorable drinking experience.”

Barrel aged beers are just like the term says: beer placed inside a wooden barrel (which typically contained wine or a spirit previously). It is typical as part of the barrel aging process to ensure that the beer is in the barrel over multiple seasons (fall/winter – spring/summer – fall/winter) to permit the beer to expand into the barrel during the warm times of the year and contract back out; in this way the beer extracts the flavors embedded in the barrel.

It may well be that the oak chip aging method employed by Tennent Caledonian ‘mimics’ barrel aging.

Cheers!

 

Here's a few you may want to check out:

http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/430/18698/

http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/430/144086/

 

Just FYI - you won't find Pipeworks the Money. It is only in Chicago, the brewery is really small, and you can't buy their beers outside of about a 25 mile radius of Chicago...

 

While you're out there, hit up Goose Island and take care of a couple of glasses of Bourbon County Barleywine.

Another one that i've enjoyed is Anchorage Brewing's A Deal with the Devil. Cognac barrel aged Barleywine...definitely one to look out for.

 

Innis & Gunn has some stuff that might be what you're looking for.