Now that everyone is bourbon barrel aging, is it over?

I did no Goose Island chasing this year. I easily got 14 cans of BA Ten FIDY which is a beer that I strongly prefer. As for KBS, I've always liked the regular Breakfast Stout more but CBS is worth the hype.

I would like to see more beers aged in barrels that held spirits other than bourbon.

 

In case you only follow beer, bourbon continues to plow along as the fastest growing premium spirit. Blended whiskies reusing bourbon barrels are for the most part, stagnant. Therefore there should be even more available bourbon barrels for scotch, beer, and now mega-wine companies (Gallo/Constellation/etc). Apothic "Inferno" red blend and Robert Mondavi PR Cab aged in BB are two of the absolute hottest SKUs in wine right now.

I've never met a (pro or home) brewer who wasn't at the minimum "interested in experimenting" with barrels. The issue has always been buying the barrels in enough quantity to make the experiment worthwhile (for commercial). People like drinking them, brewers like brewing them.

It is a legitimate point that BBAing a stout doesn't automatically turn it to gold, that I agree with. But it's about as far "from over" as can be.

 

I love BA beers. Until they are no longer consistently good there aren't enough.

 

Now that everyone is announcing that trends are over, is announcing that trends are over over?

 

Over? No. Only if barrels aren't available to brewers or homebrewers is it over. More times than not (with some exceptions of course), beers get better tasting from time in a barrel vs. their base.

 

Sure would like to see expanded KBS production! They could probably double or triple it and still would sell out quickly.

 

Personally, I am not a fan, but I understand the attraction for other pallets. I am a purist for stouts. Anyways, even though I would rather have a non-barrel aged stout, I agree with the majority here..its never going to die out.

 

I sure hope so

 

Not over. Certainly over done to a point of a bunch of mediocre beers, odd aging times, and using barrels for beers that in no way helps them. There is a balance of a great base beer, proper aging time, and blending. So few breweries have the skill sets present to nail everything involved its getting sad. Talent is spread thin.

 

No.

 

A strong barrel flavor can cover up a lot of flaws, so I see the borderline breweries doing even more barrel aging.

 

I would like to see more barrel aging without the bourbon or whiskey. I enjoy the wood notes but don't care for the burn of the liquor.

 

I agree with your post, but sometimes an overdone barrel flavor is a flaw.

 

It's not over until the barrel sources disappear, and I can think of only two ways that could happen:

1. For some insane (or illogical) reason the distilleries refuse to sell the barrels to brewers.
2. The demand for barrels gets so high that the price of barrels skyrockets. Breweries hike the price of the barrel-aged beers in response, and we the consumer refuse to buy these pricey beers. Some breweries can't afford the cost of these unsold beers, thus they go bankrupt, and other breweries discontinue making BBA beers.

 

I like that I can scroll past a Bourbon County release and jump ship to a better Lagunitas one. This is the ride or die segment of the craft beer, pop pop pop!

 

5Beans isn't barrel aged

 

you win for account name of the century

 

i dunno. i suspect you might be confused about what's really going on. bourbon & rye interest may be up, but i'm pretty sure it's actually the growing scarcity that is driving more interest - NOT a successful production boom.

what you & particularly brewers or others who rely on barrels should realize is the issue isn't simply surging demand. it's a surge in demand based on goods/resources that were considered a loss/flop 30 years ago. the great plethora of 15, 20, 23 or more year old barrels that were flooding the market up until maybe 2012 only reached those great ages because the distillers/producers who originally made them FAILED to sell them at standard bottling ages. the result? the spirit sat in barrels (aging further) all the years it couldn't be sold.

as you can imagine, most of those producers went out of business, sold off their assets/ properties, lost their expert staff, strains of yeast & everything associated with the business (back then). as you should be further able to imagine, being considered a loss, production was NOT backed as it made zero sense to back-up something unplanned (then) & a major failure.

fast forward. decades later, that terrible failure, through a lot of sheer luck & timing became a national treasure. realize something tho'. there's a 20 or so year production gap that was following directly behind the accidental treasure. we are now well into that production gap. the great hoax is all the original makers & locations went belly up - but surviving distillers today bought /retained those original brand names & continue to try to pass of today's production **seamlessly** as the same named products that became treasured.

the main reason demand seems so high in my estimation is because the producers today simply can't replicate the accidental stuff that was created before the collapse in the late 80s. now they find small #s/ %s of barrels today that age well enough to be bottled as premium product. those tiny %s create furious demand (extremely limited supply = frenzy). what's ignored is the sea of barrels that aren't surpassing those premium, well aged benchmarks.

cliff notes re-summary: there was an unintended glut of long aged whiskey barrels. in the height of the existence of those glut barrels, barrel aged beer soared. as of a couple of years back, the glut was completely depleted. going forward, it looks like brewers are going to have to rely on & play with more recently produced barrels that can't seem to survive those long periods/ages. sadly, from what little i've gotten, it seems many major brewers are just as aware & astute on the specific issue as the average Beer Advocate member.

 

I agree that strong bourbon taste can cover other flavors - good or not. But - this isn't a good business strategy for breweries with crappy beers. The expense in terms of barrels, time, labor, and space must be passed on to the consumer in the form of a barrel aged beer that will sell at a higher price point. It's reportedly a fine line to walk - lots of expense and risk, and generally low volume constrained by time/space/barrels. The more successful breweries such as Founders seem more cautious - not barrel aging everything in sight, rotating through several BA beers each year, market testing small batches, in general not over-extending themselves.

 

I mean, the bottom line is, how many barrels are getting emptied, and what's the demand for them? We can speculate on this all we want, but without any real data it's kind of pointless. And all the data I've been able to find on bourbon sales is regarding dollar amounts, not actual volume. Sales are up, but how much of that that is volume and how much of it is the premium-ization of bourbon? It still seem likely to me that the total number of used bourbon barrels produced per year is greater today than it was, say, half a decade ago, but has the demand for them outstripped that growth?

The other thing I'm curious about is the quality of available cooperage. From the perspective of a brewery, what is the difference between a barrel that went into Jim Beam white label and one that was used for, say, Elmer T. Lee? I've heard some people say it doesn't make much difference, but then, I've had this beer and I'll be damned if you can't taste some excellent quality Buffalo Trace product in it.