I am looking to purchase a 20 liter (5 gal) oak barrel and need some input. Why do the big guys sell used barrels? I am talking about beer brewers, and want to know how many brews can you expect to get from a barrel? Any other tips concerning barrel aging would be appreciated.
I'm not any kind of expert on this but I'll guess that after using the barrels for aging a beer that there is a loss of the desired flavor (bourbon in most cases) that could be expected to be available for another use. There is also a regular concern that these barrels are prone to picking up 'bugs' that are difficult to remove before any re-use. I don't know how may times a brewer will try to use a barrel, but I'd be surprised if it is more than twice. I think I've read that New Holland uses bourbon barrels for Dragon's Milk, and then uses them a second time for their Pilgrim's Dole, so there is documentation of at least twice. Will this 5-gallon barrel that you are considering for purchase be a previously-used barrel, or something new? If it is a new barrel then you'll need to figure out the bet way to sanitize it. There is another active thread that touches on the sanitation topic. http://beeradvocate.com/community/threads/procured-a-whisky-barrel-now-what.102179/
You CAN use a barrel as many times as you like until the beer comes out infected...but you may not WANT to. You do lose the flavor of the spirit that was in the barrel (if it was a used barrel) and you do start to have a harder time pulling the oak flavor out after several uses as well. Meaning you'll need to leave the beer in longer to get oak flavor out. What I do is to add more alcohol, usually whiskey, into the barrel between beer uses and rotate the barrel a little every day to keep the barrel sanitized and to add some more whiskey back into te barrel for the next beer. I've had great results doing that with 5 gallon barrels for up to 5-6 uses. After that, it takes so long to extract any oak flavor, that it just becomes a fermentation vessel. At that point, when the barrel is "neutral" to the flavor of the beer, I have soured mine for sour beer aging. And once again, you can use that until you get a bad beer out... Hope that helps. That approach is much more feasible and less costly than risking an entire commercial batch of beer, so I bet most professional breweries take a more cautious approach and use the barrels less than that. Hope that helps.
