I have been experimenting with aging beers in oak barrels. I got lucky and got three 10 gallon barrels relatively cheap. With each of them I brewed a few straight beers, and then switched over to sour beer (1 flanders barrel and 2 lambic). I am interested in whether others are using oak barrels, if and how they are cleaning them, and what their overall experiences have been over time.
I have seen that the extraction of oak flavors is a greater with new barrels and stronger beers. As beers are aged in the barrel, each progressive batch takes longer to develop wood/oak character. After 3 or 4 batches the oak character is greatly diminished and I have seen some sour notes in the beers whether working on it or not. I have been happy with the results for sour beers, and have started some solera type experiments with my flanders.
Between batches I typically am cleaning with soda ash mixtures and storing the barrels with a combination of sulfide and citric acid. I have not tried to take apart a barrel and recondition it, but may eventually try doing this as well.
Is anyone else out there working with barrel aging?
I have a 5-gal oak barrel that I have been playing with for a while.
For my first effort, I soaked it with hot potassium metabisulfite, rinsed a few times, then dumped a 1.75 of Evan williams in.
The whiskey turned out really nice
But then I put a batch of IPA in that wasn’t all that good (but I attribute it to the overabundance of fresh hops that I used).
Anyway, I’ve since cleaned that sucker out, soaked it in more metabisulfite, and loaded it up with a 3 gallon batch of port.
That stayed in there for 4 months or so (pretty tasty as it turned out), and then I loaded it full of Strong Brown ale and Roselare bugs. I’m planning on letting the brown sit there for 9-12 months and then I will brew a similar batch and keep the funky bugs going.
For what its worth, I have been adding citric acid to my sulfite solution for barrel storage, as the limited material I can see about using oak suggested this. I have also been cleaning with soda ash (sodium carbonate) or sodium carbonate/peroxide (PBW/oxyclean type) cleaner between batches.
I have had good results with the roselare bugs in the 8-14 month time frame, but am leaning towards recommending that you repitch a roselare pack as a minimum if you are trying to keep the barrel going with a new batch. After 18 or 20 months (after pulling 5 of the 10 gallons and refilling with fresh S. Cervasae fermented beer, I am getting the impression that certain microorganisms out-compete others and the stuff that is actually reproducing at the end of a year or two may not exactly duplicate what was originally pitched. Similar with my lambic, which after 18 months in the barrel seems to have gone through a pedio phase, but the Brett has not come to the forefront, leading me to plan a pitch of B. Lambicus in the next few weeks.
