Let's talk about barrel aging beer

This is where they stored the first Parabola when Boulevard joined the Duvel-Moortgat family. I'm unsure if this still occurs. Boulevard does have a very large industrial warehouse space separate from their brewing and serving facilities. It's unclear if this is where they age and/or if they use it to store beer pre-distro.

It has made me wonder if this helps save large breweries money, or if it just works out to pennies in difference.

 

I’d like to know too. I recently got some stout barrel aged Jameson though. Talk about the circle of life.

 

Michigan folks can weigh in with more details, but didn’t Founders move their barrels off-site a few years back? I think to an old depot, but I could be wrong.

 

A long time ago Lost Abbey had trouble with infection from reusing barrels. I've never heard of any breweries doing so since, but some mention "freshly emptied" or "second use". Is that to distinguish themselves from breweries that reuse?

 

I think it is less common, but the barrels can be used again.

 

I believe those terms are referring to having been freshly emptied of liquor and second use after liquor, as opposed to beers that are aged in freshly made wooden barrels.

Cost of storage will totally depend on how large of a space the brewer uses and how much their rent/property costs are. I know that Firestone has a large barrel facility in Buelton. Their cost per barrel day is going to be different than a brewer who is located in a lower cost location or a brewer who only has a handful of barrels kept in an otherwise unused area of their brewing facility.

 

Yes, that was what I meant, sorry if I wasn't clear. Breweries that use those terms are making it known that they fill barrels with beer only once. That they feel the need to make that distinction makes me wonder if some breweries fill their bourbon barrels with beer more than once.

 

Founders has their barrel aging facility in an old train station a mile or two from their brewery. It's a huge facility.

 

In every context that I've heard Brewers using the term "second use," they are referring to a second aging with beer. For example, a local brewery just emptied Bourbon barrels containing BA Stout. They immediately re-filled those barrels with a Wee Heavy. That Wee Heavy is in "second use" barrels.

It's my understanding that Bourbon barrels can still impart significant (though diminished) flavor in a second use, but the barrel is fairly neutral flavor-wise and more prone to microorganism growth after that.

 

Here's the problem with barrel aging, there are NO guarantees that the beer won't spoil or oxidize in the barrel. Another issue is paying for the space. Shit, there are barrels of utopias out there that are over 20 years old now. That's 20 years of paying rent on the space.

 

For many years Founders used an old salt mine somewhere underground in the Grand Rapids area. I don't know if they still do that since moving their barreling operation into this old depot building. Probably not.

I'd be curious to find out if this old train station contains brewing equipment, or if the beer is still brewed at the original location and put into barrels which are then transported for storage in this depot building. The times that I've driven past this facility (it's easily seen right along US-131 just south of the downtown area) I've never noticed grain silos or other hints of brewing, although I'm busy driving in a busy traffic area. It would have given them an opportunity to expand their brewing operation since the main location is getting pretty land-locked which limits future expansion there.

 

I'm going to disagree with your first paragraph. I think 'second use' is referring to the fact that the liquor that was in the barrel is the first use, and this is the first time that the barrel has contained a beer, thus is has 'fresh' liquor characteristics from being in the barrel.

I agree with your second paragraph that the barrel imparts less liquor flavor on its next use, but that will probably depend on how long the first beer was aged.

With each re-use of a barrel the odds go up regarding the probability that wild yeast or other similar critters get into that barrel and infect the next beer that goes into it. There are old threads in this forum or the homebrewing forum that have mentioned something like 30%-40% of the barrels can be expected to have spoiled beer at the end of the aging period, hence another reason that drives up the cost of BA beers.

I think any brewer who tries to use a barrel a third time had better know what he's doing and have ****-and-span sanitation procedures when filling barrels.

 

Those Jameson variants from either stout or IPA barrels are good stuff.

 

New Holland has Beer Barrel Bourbon on store shelves if you want to try something local. They've been making that for 8-10 years now (I think). They used to purchase bourbon from a distiller in Indiana and put it into barrels that formerly held Dragon's Milk, but I suspect they distill their own bourbon nowadays. I had it when it was first introduced, and though it was a pretty rough bourbon, but I'm no connoisseur. Don't know if today's product is any better.