Let's talk about barrel aging beer

Yeah, you'd think so. But, we live in a time of Milkshake "IPAs", Flaming Hot Cheetos beer, and Sour Pickle beer. I no longer have the thought "Naw, what brewer would do that?".

 

The wooden barrels that are used for producing Barrel Aged beers are not constructed to hold pressure; they were built to age spirits or wine which are non-carbonated products.

Wooden barrels of yore (and still a few today) for containing beer would have been more heavily constructed to hold pressure (e.g., 2.5 volumes of CO2) and typically lined with pitch to keep the beer from contacting the wood.

Pilsner Urquell still employs coopers to construct a limited number of wooden vessels for lagering and serving their beers. Below is a video of Vaclav Berka tapping a small wooden barrel of Pilsner Urquell:



Cheers!

 

I have a hack that skips the barrel. I got a silver medal in my category over the summer at a homebrew competition.

5 gallon batch...Go to Lowe's and get a bag of Jack Daniels smoking chips. They are just old barrels they have retired. They chop them up and sell them for barbecuing. Take 2 pint glasses worth of chips and soak them in the whiskey/bourbon of your choice for about a month. I put them in muslin bags with magnets and attach them to the carboy wall. The same process as my dry hopping. I also drop abot 2 tablespoons of the remaining bourbon into the beer before sealing it up. Put beer in a warm dark place and soak for a other month. Longer for more flavor I suppose. Then keg or bottle. I bottle it and let it mellow for about 9 months because I use this on a Russian imperial stout that's like 10% ABV. I brew it around this time of year and drink it in late fall. It's my "annual release" beer for friends and family.

It's more controlled than a barrel.

Cheers!!!

 

Your homebrewed beer sounds tasty.

For other BAs who might be interested in knowing more about how we homebrewers age using oak:

There are plenty of choices when it comes to adding oak to beer:

• Choice of oak: American oak, French oak, Hungarian oak
• Format of oak: chips, cubes, spirals,...
• Level of toast: medium, heavy

And how much to add to the batch is a choice along with contact time.

And you brought up the topic of the pre-soak - which spirit or other (e.g., wine) to choose.

I have brewed using oak only once to produce a Bourbon oaked Porter. I decided to conduct a pre-soak of the American oak, medium toast cubes with Jim Beam bourbon to remove potential tannins, decant the Jim Beam, and conduct a second soak in Makers Mark Bourbon and added the oak/Makers Mark to the Porter in the secondary. About 2-3 weeks of contact time. That beer was quite enjoyable to drink.

Cheers to oaking beers!

 

Yep my next creation is an all spruce tip pale ale. I have a tall tree I have had my eye on for years while hiking

 

https://beerandbrewing.com/brewers-perspective-the-patience-and-terror-of-barrel-aging/

@Resistance88 some more things to consider in this article.

 

Super delayed response, but I'm not wrong here with 2015 being the last year of BCBBW being in 3rd use barrels. Here is a screen shot from their own website right now where you can purchase 2014 (and 2013). indicating it was in 3rd use barrels.



Also, here's a photo of a 2015 BCBBW that clearly indicates 3rd use barrels on the back neck label.



I don't recall the source of the infection (i.e. bottle caps or something else), but I do recall they discovered that it's some strain that originated in rice wine vinegar. There's a video somewhere where the head brewer at the time (Jared?) goes into detail about it all.

 

After

 

https://www.mbaa.com/education/webinars/Pages/Screening-for-Lactobacillus-Acetotolerans-.aspx

Some info as to why this strain of lactobacillus is so difficult to detect in finished beer.

 

Too late to edit my last post so.....

I really used the 2016 bcbs infections to write off goose island once and for all. After reading about that lacto strain and the almost insurmountable job of detecting it in finished beer, I feel almost guilty for my judgment. Almost. All of the InBev behaviors certainly are enough for me to abstain from purchasing their beers, but I'm gonna have to let the infection go. I mean a bacteria that is viable but will not plate? Stfu.

 

Here's the interview I was thinking of. It's with Jared Jankowski the former head brewer at the time and is done through Good Beer Hunting. In depth and ~50 minutes. Enjoy.

https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/gbh-podcast/2016/5/13/hype-002-jared

 

In the wine trade oak barrels can be re-charred after usage. There is a limited life for barrels, but I would suppose it varies according to what is being fermented or aged in barrel. I do know that fine oak cooperage is not cheap.

 

Note just disclosed but probably actively marketed as a benefit. This was the first batch following the illustrious King Henry, which if memory serves me right was bourbon (Pappy) then OG Rare, then the King. So marketing it in a way that followed KH made sense.

 

Speaking of third use barrels, the amazing Siesta Key Distillery, which produces the best rum in the world in their Siesta Key Solera series (seriously, I would put this up neat against any other spirit I have every had, ANY) does a “beer barrel series”, aging their spiced rum on barrels that previously aged beer. Presumably, many (perhaps most) of those barrel originally held bourbon or some other spirit. Just skimming their website, the only one where it specifies where the original barrel came from prior to receiving the beer is batch one (Jack Daniel’s, then CCB Forgotten Island, then Siesta Key spiced rum). The focus for the series is moreso on the beer and most batches do list the specific beer name, so some deductive investigation could be done to find out the original barrels for many batches.

 

Ha, well, in my defense, I didn't have any of the infected 2015 version. Also, someone replied to my original post indicating that the bottle caps were not the issue.

 

this may have already been mentioned, i suspect the info there is an average for a specific brand but the underlined figure (generalized of course) would depend on the amount of time the barrel is aged, the evaporation rates over that period of time, the ABV of the contents vs the amount of water applied if the final product is being cut to "bottle strength".

 

there often is water on the front end too. many bourbons are distilled to proofs higher than the 125° legal entry limit. those require being watered down to the legal entry proof or lower.

 

this may have come up already but the obvious conflict is King Henry & the subsequent Barley Wine releases. everybody knows that King Henry went back into the PVW23 barrels the original Rare had been aged in.

 

i hardly bought anything 2016 forward for the same reason.

don't second guess yourself & trust your instincts. you were right. there is a whole slew of identifiable missteps, some of which were visible negligence. starting at the very beginning, upwards of 65% of the coffee variant was discarded before Black Friday/ release day due to spoilage. they knew they had a problem before release, they still released product & then pretended to have no idea. & don't get me wrong. they might not have known what exactly the problem was but they knew there was a problem.

 

I'll ask the guy down the street that flys 747s for them. He always is going overseas though, gone more than he is home.