Barrel Aging

Taste early and often. The much larger surface area to volume ratio of small barrels will cause your beer to get flavored much more quickly than the large barrels used by breweries. It is easy for a beer to go from barrel aged goodness to woody mess, especially the barrels first beer.

 

I'm using ten gallon barrels to age Imperial Stouts. For a first time use of a used bourbon barrel I start checking at 1 week, and every week thereafter. Typically 3-5 weeks is where I end up pulling the beer out of the barrel. For a second use barrel I first check at 1 month, and every 2-3 weeks after that. Your smaller barrels might need checking sooner.

 

http://simplybeer.com/2012/06/13/how-to-use-and-care-for-your-oak-barrel/

 

I bottle condition. I add a small amount of fresh yeast along with my priming sugar.

 

I used a 5 gallon barrel a few months ago. RIS went in first and it was there for about 3 weeks, then a barleywine for about 3 weeks. The barleywine probably would have been fine a little longer, but the RIS definitely picked up the wood and bourbon flavors very quickly.

 

This cant be stressed enough. Also, a first fill of beer in a fresh small format barrel will extract the most harsh barrel character regardless of how little or long you leave the beer in it. You should seriously consider brewing a very strong beer to use as a sort of short term "wash" in the barrel. A bolder, aggressive brew like an american barleywine or bitter roasty imperial stout will be able to stand up against the harsher barrel charcter that can get extracted from the first use.

Once you get those initial harsher woody notes extracted, you can let other beers ride in the barrel longer to develope those smoother, more pleasant notes of caramel, vanilla, coconut, etc. With my 10 gallon oak barrels, 3 months seems to be the limit of what I can tolerate. Longer than 3 months in a 10 gallon barrel gets to be excessive with oxidation.

A common misconception about barrel aging is all too often I hear brewers looking at it like it is an ingredient in the brewing process. You need to go at it differently and think about it more like a aging/conditioning process. The beer will be ready when you taste it and it seems right to you. You will learn the balance of positive barrel character verse negative (oxidation) as you sample its progress. With that being said, sure you can sample often but be smart about it with sanitation.

 

My experience with sour beers aged in barrels has been different than this. My first fill in the barrel tasted like a 2x4 for about 6 months, after which all of the harsh barrel character disappeared and was transformed into vanilla, coconut and a light bit of tannin. This may be different than aging a non sour beer, as the brett can go to town on the lignin in the barrel and produce some nice esters/flavors, however I think it might be a bit of both.

 

Advice for the barrel treatments:

Brew extra to top up and blend with. I've been kegging beer and letting it age in the keg next to the barrel (not carbed) and then topping up the barrel as needed from a cobra tap. For Flander's Reds where I wanted some acetobacter (acetic acid) I kept some extra beer in a bucket and topped up from that, as the barrel fermenting beer wasn't picking up any. Good chance your barrel aged beer will need some blending if it comes out too heavy on the barrel character, so important to have a good sized portion to blend with (I brew at the same time, so beers are of similar age).

Tasting often helps, but make sure you're not constantly opening the top of the barrel (via the bung) and exposing your beer to more oxygen. Use the sterilized stainless steel nail trick (small diameter, sanitized stainless nail in barrel head that you can pull out to extract beer in small doses). This has the added advantage that if you're topping up and want to taste, you're not pulling from the top which may have potentially non-uniformly mixed beer.

 

I probably should have prefaced that my comments were strictly regarding clean, not wild brews. Each sour ive done has only ever entered a barrel after I deemed it "neutral" for the most part from the initial spirit flavors.

 

I have an 8 gallon bourbon barrel. The first turn in the barrel was a 7% abv porter, and it had reached my desired level of barrelization in about 5 days. The surface area of a small barrel and the fact that it was still wet with bourbon made this process very quick. Currently the barrel is filled with a 14% abv Old Ale, its been in there about 6 weeks and is almost perfect. I taste the beer (and top off the angel's share) about once a week.