How to cut and toast your own oak for oaked beers

@inchrisin thanks for posting the vid. I was getting frustrated, even with the advice.

 

Wow, you guys in Vermont live kind of primitively if all of you have wood cook stoves! Enjoyed the video.

Any thoughts on whether white oak is a necessity, or will other flavors/species work too? I don't keep a backyard full of firewood, so I'd probably go to Lowe's and buy a small board. I know they have red oak, but not sure about white. Or, second-guessing myself, by the time I spend money for a board, I'd probably be better off just buying toasted oak from the LHBS?

 

There is a lot of info out there on wood and beer. I have seen red or white. Oak for sale, as well as other species.
Currently I am toasting some hard maple and in about an hour, will start on the cherry wood. Poplar will be the last wood to be processed. I read somewhere it was used as a barrel stav wood, so why not.

Not all of us cook on an old wood stove, but it's nice to get heat and cooking , or wood drying at the same time. Primitive??? Guess so.

Maybe I'll put up some red oak to, just for comparison.

You may be better buying from a store. I have lots of wood so this is a fun thing to do on a rainy day. Kitchen smells outstanding, and it only cost me a little work.

 

I'll betcha cherry wood will taste good in beer. I'm going to try cedar someday.

 

Red oak is fine. It is not used for barrels because of the porosity. Red oak barrels won't hold liquid as well as white oak due to a lack of tylose in the pores.
Maple will work really good and has been used before. Sugar maple would be best and seeing as you're in Vermont it most likely is sugar maple. Cigar city has used it although I don't believe it was toasted.
Cherry wood has been used in wine making for a while. Not sure of any beers though.
Poplar is not something I would use but might be interesting. Alder has been used before in beer and I'm sure most of us know about budweiser being aged on Birch. Cigar city has used Spanish cedar and the results are delicious. Recently they have been using cypress. Haven't tred that yet so I can't comment on how it tastes.

 

The hard maple is smelling sweet and thick. I'm thinkin it will add. Body but am not sure. The cherry is in the oven now and is not emitting any scent. Seems to be taking longer than the oak, but the oak was 1. Year old. And the maple cherry is 2 months dead.

Gotta convince inchrisin to utilize his multipal gallon fermenters .

 

I made some pecan honey combs and charred them at different levels. They are soaking in vodka right now. I'm trying to use more southern ingredients in my beer. I am going to see what type of flavor pecan wood imparts (i love using it to smoke meats) and go from there.

 

Cool. I don't have a sweet rustic stove, a good source of white oak, or a taste for oaked beers, but it's cool to see others' DIY efforts.

 

Cherry is done and does not give off a ton of scent. Gonna put some of the hard maple in the chocolate coconut stout.
2 b continued

 

Love me a good oaked beer. Wish I had some oak trees to try this on, looks like a great way to save some $$ and also have more control of what goes in your beer. Good post

 

Thanks for posting this information. I'm thinking that, for those of us who don't have a wood stove, we could possibly quite easily accomplish the same thing on our Barbeques. I cooked a salmon on a cedar board on the barbeque, and afterwards, the cedar was nice and toasted. I don't have any oak around, but I do have a sugar maple in the front yard. I regret tossing out some of the trimmed branches last Fall. I'll have to to trim some more this Spring.

 

@inchrisin Briquette's and dream state, priceless

Be carefull on using saw dust, a friend who works for a bigger brewer told me of an experimental beer that was completely drain poured because of way to much oak astringincy. I do not know the volume of oak used in the drain pour but said pal tryed it at home with oak sawdust and had similar results.

oak smoked oak sounds tempting. Could be all be heading down the extream beer highway?

 

Use Spanish cedar which is a relative of mahogany. A coniferous cedar is said to have toxins. Maybe you already know that, but others won't.

 

Nice video. Thanks for sharing.

 

There are all sorts of possibilities. For example, you could possibly smoke the oak in the BBQ along with some other wood, for example hickory, or better yet, peat. It might provide some interesting flavours.

 

This diagram was created by World Cooperage as a visual way of explaining heat’s effects on wood, in this case American Oak, and the characteristics that develop at various temperatures. The actual temperatures for (and presence of) particular flavors will vary depending on the levels of cellulose, hemicellulose, tannins, and lignin in the wood, so this chart won’t be across the board correct. However, the chart is a good rule of thumb and illustrates the temperature’s influence on wood well



Thought this might be interesting to would be wood users.

I put the wood on the middle rack of the oven and set my timer for an hour. Less than five minutes in, the kitchen has a great wood smell which, by the thirty minute mark, developed a characteristic I can only describe as “harsh”.

After the hour was up, I had five ounces of medium-toast Cherry woodchips, which looked like this: