Do you seek a more complex character in the sours you brew? The solera process might be a path to that goal. The term solera, a noun, is defined as “a system for aging Sherry and other fortified wines, in which younger wines in upper rows of casks are used to top up casks of older wines stored below in order to produce a consistently aged blend.” The literal translation is “on the ground” and is traditionally the lowest of three stacked barrels. The upper barrels, or criaderas (lit. “nursery,” but also variously referred to as scales or clases), contain increasingly younger liquids the higher they are in the stack. 

The concept, which likely originated within the Iberian Peninsula for consistency in vinegar, Sherry, and Madeira production, is that a portion of the solera will be emptied and packaged, often on an annual basis, then topped up with an equal portion of liquid via gravity transfer from the criadera above, and so on until the top-most criadera is topped off with freshly fermented liquid. This ensures a blend of fermented beverage with the youngest in the top criadera and the oldest in the solera at the bottom. Therefore, no container is ever drained completely and so portions of the original fill will always be present, though in diminishing volumes. 

The solera process of aging and blending liquids in wood can also be applied successfully to beer making, but on a larger and small home scale.

Traditional Solera Blending

When considering the technique, the first question may be: Why barrel age beer? The reasons are numerous. The wood character derived from the barrel can beautifully complement the beer being stored in it — some styles even require this character. The barrel also acts as a great storage vessel that soon becomes host to plentiful yeasts like Brettanomyces and bacteria that create complex characteristics that otherwise are not found in beer fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast alone. 

Applying the solera process adds additional complexity to the finished beer, as it is a great way to age beer for long periods of time and be able to mitigate the sourness and/or acetic characteristics of the oldest beer with the fresher, younger beer from the criaderas above.

The solera method of barrel blending is distinct from traditional barrel blending as the solera method blends various vintages of the same barrel, resulting in a mixed-vintage blend that is continuously being added to. Combining multiple vintages of a single beer can result in a complex and nuanced blend. To assist in calculating the combined age of your solera blend, Michael Tonsmeire, author of American Sour Beers, developed a spreadsheet that calculates the age of a solera that is available here.

Beer added to the uppermost barrel can be fully fermented or can be added as wort with primary fermentation occurring in the barrel, depending on the character of the beer one is seeking. Barrel aging beer allows fermenting agents other than standard brewer’s yeast to affect the beers character. Adding beer that has already undergone primary fermentation plays differently with Brettanomyces and other alternative fermenters and, in my experience, creates a more complex final product than a 100% Brett fermentation. In addition, adding unfermented wort to a barrel can create a messy fermentation. 

A Homebrew Solera (Fauxlera)

Homebrewers, who likely do not have the space or need the volumes that would result from a multiple-large barrel system, can create a solera program using a single barrel (or other vessel), a process I like to call “fauxlera.” In this system, the vessel is filled with the original brew. After some amount of time aging, a volume of aged beer is removed and topped off with a fresh portion, thereby leaving percentages, albeit ever diminishing, of each addition, in perpetuity. How often you draw off/replace an amount is up to you, and should be driven by taste, but once or twice a year seems like a reasonable goal.

Most homebrewers would likely find the volume of a standard wine barrel (59 gallons/225 L) too large — not only is it difficult to fill with most common homebrew equipment, but also difficult to consume! If you are part of a homebrew club; however, a group barrel could be a fantastic investment, as they are relatively common, generally affordable for a group-buy, and due to their size, have slow overall evaporation rates. The same cannot be said for smaller barrels, which are generally more difficult to come by (though you can buy them online, if you are willing to pay the shipping on top of the cost). Additionally, the rapid evaporation rate is a real concern, as a small barrel will lose a much higher percentage of its volume than a standard wine barrel. For me, this is a loss of about 13% of my volume per year, though the amount will depend in part on other factors like storage conditions.

It Starts with a Barrel

The type of oak and toasting and what, if anything, was previously aged in it can make a big difference to the character a barrel will impart to your beer. While the brewer can be very creative with pairing a particular barrel to a beer, some styles work better with specific barrels than others. For example, I find saison ales to  pair wonderfully with French oak barrels that once contained red or white wine. Bourbon barrels, on the other hand, are made of American oak with the Bourbon imparting a distinctly different character than a wine barrel and are much better suited to imperial stouts and other big, malty styles. Additionally, the wood character that is imparted diminishes relatively quickly each time it is used. Be creative and work with what you can source.

Once you find a barrel, it will need to be inspected and conditioned. Remove the bung and take a whiff before you buy a barrel. If it does not smell good, it likely won’t make good tasting beer — certain types of molds and bacteria are very difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate. Also, the staves will have likely contracted and may not hold liquid if a barrel has sat empty for any appreciable amount of time. Some leakage usually isn’t a concern. If they have not sat dry for too long, it is easy to rehydrate the staves by filling the barrel with chlorine-free water and topping up until it is watertight. Do this outside or in a large sink/tub, as a freshly filled dry barrel will leak like something out of a cartoon! If you find an empty barrel and need to store it for a period of time before you are ready to fill it, you can stabilize and store it by adding a solution of 1 tsp. citric acid and 1.5 tsp. potassium metabisulfite per gallon (3.8 L) of hot water added to the empty barrel. Rotate the barrel occasionally and it can be stored this way indefinitely. But note that it will strip the wood character, so it is best to limit the amount of time it sits.

Once you have sourced and conditioned a barrel, long-term storage is the next consideration. This involves sourcing or constructing a cradle for your barrel to allow stable storage, ease of access, and potential mobility. Even smaller barrels are heavy when filled, so it will require a sturdy cradle. Casters are an option on cradles as long as they are adequately weight-rated. If you are going to be using more than one barrel, commercially available barrel stacking racks in metal or plastic are available. You may also need to utilize a pump to transfer pulls from the barrel. 

Barrels of all sizes can be purchased online from brokers like Midwest Barrel Co., Northeast Barrel Co., and others that will come up in an Internet search. The other option is looking at local wineries, distilleries, or breweries who may have barrels they are willing to sell. I am fortunate to live in the “wine country” of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. But even here, it took me a couple years of focused searching to find a smaller oak wine barrel, with a generous dash of wheeling and dealing with a winery to sell it to me. I was fortunate to end up sourcing a 15-gallon (57-L) French oak barrel from a local winery that had been used for a test batch of Cabernet Sauvignon for $100. I love my little barrel! However, as mentioned earlier, contents in smaller barrels do evaporate more quickly and I lose approximately 2 gallons (8 L) per year. I built a cradle out of pressure-treated stock and installed casters to allow the barrel to be moved as needed over short distances, as it weighs nearly 150 pounds (68 kg) when filled. Also, consider barrel placement as well for racking out of the barrel — as mine is on the floor, I needed to purchase a self-priming, anti-gravity transfer pump as a standard racking cane will not suffice.  

A Homebrew Fauxlera Example

My dear friend and brewing buddy Tom Francque and I started our homebrewing adventures together in 2017. We have slowly built our experience and our brewing system together and share a passion for quality, consistency, and innovation. Together, we decided that our locally sourced French oak barrel would nicely complement a French saison. We started engineering our recipe and decided that we did not want to rely only upon wild fermentation agents to inoculate the initial barrel fill to limit unregulated variables with some yeast laboratory-grown critters. In an effort to create the most complex beer, we also decided not to limit any potential Lactobacillus production, which contributes a rounded sourness to the beer, so we limited IBUs in the brewed saison to around 10 (that said, if you want to limit lactic tartness in your beer, you can hop your beer more heavily). Other than limiting the IBU level, we brewed a standard saison recipe (details on page 39). We decided to conduct primary fermentation in our regular fermenters rather than the barrel as we didn’t want to deal with the mess and loss from high kraüsen in the barrel.

Since we did not yet have our current 15-gallon (57-L) brew system, we ended up brewing two initial batches to fill the barrel; one of 6 gallons (23 L) in the fermenter, the other of 11 gallons (42 L). This way we could stockpile a portion in a container like a growler or Corny keg to top off the barrel and offset the evaporation. I brewed the first 6-gallon (23-L) batch of French Saison in September 2020, and then Tom and I brewed the second batch on our larger shared system in October 2020 and pitched Imperial B64 (Napoleon) yeast for primary fermentation on both batches (we hit around 1.002 final gravity on both after primary fermentation, so keep this in mind when estimating gravity and ABV). We then reserved 64 ounces (1.9 L) from each brew session in growlers equipped with airlocks to use as top-off portions. After setting aside the two growlers, we transferred the remaining saison to the barrel and added a pitch of Omega Brettanomyces claussenii and another of Imperial W15 (Suburban Brett) to dose and funkify our new barrel.

We let the barrel sit for nine months with two 64-oz./1.9-L barrel top-offs in between — yeah, a small barrel really evaporates! — by which time our occasional tastings led us to conclude that it was time to pull our first 5 gallons (19 L) to bottle. Queue fantasy sequence! That batch, and we only have a couple of bottles left, is to this day one of the best beverages I have ever had a hand in creating. The oak character, coupled with the Brett and bugs we added, was amazing. And this was from a single barrel! As homebrewers, consistency matters less, so take advantage. Your first barrel pull is going to be the goods and you don’t need a formal solera to accomplish it. 

But have fun with subsequent barrel pulls! In addition to multiple straight pulls, we have now racked 5-gallon (19-L) batches into fermenters with Concord grapes (outstanding), local Mt. Hood strawberries (yum, yum, yum, yum!) and are aiming to dry hop our next pull onto New Zealand Wakatu^TM hops. We like to rack these 5-gallon (19-L) “special project” fills to wide-mouthed fermenters to make adding fruit (and subsequently removing fruit after racking the finished beer) easier. The bit of oxygen in the headspace is not as big an issue as it would be for a delicate, hazy IPA. And it is very cool to be able to watch the pellicle develop in a clear fermenter. Don’t fear the pellicle — it is nature’s oxygen blocker. 

But what to do after that? The beer in the barrel will collectively continue to become older, which will lead to increasing sourness and acidity. In our experience, it seems that one might have to start pulling portions in ever decreasing intervals. Certainly, our barrel became progressively more sour, with vinegary, acetic acid notes, so that in last year we drained and packaged the entire barrel and topped off with 15 gallons (57-L) of fresh saison. Since the barrel was now effectively inoculated with wild yeasts and bacteria, we did not add any additional yeast as we did when we started the barrel. The “fresh” saison has aged well and is tasting amazing, and we will be pulling five gallons (19 L) onto the aforementioned Wakatu^TM hops soon. 

Let’s chat about packaging. When you add a beer like a saison to a barrel at an already very low terminal gravity, and then age on Brett and other bugs, you will end up with a beer at or below 1.000 — as dry as can be and void of most yeast that would consume bottle-priming sugar. Re-yeasting is key. It is best to condition with a strain known to tolerate higher alcohol and low pH, which makes Champagne yeast a good choice with a neutral profile. I have found that the commonly recommended LalBrew CBC-1 cask ale yeast does not stay in suspension and, at least for us, has resulted in a few batches of under-carbonated beer. Saison-style beers, especially if fermented on fruit, really take well to a Champagne-style yeast or even a wine yeast like Red Star Premier Cuvée, with a corresponding level of effervescence. For saisons, I like to target around 3.3 volumes CO₂, which should create an effervescent body with a rocky head. Use heavy Champagne-style or Belgian bottles if you are going to go this route! You could keg and force carbonate this type of beer, but bottle conditioning will allow the batches to age gracefully and be able to be tailored to the appropriate carbonation level. 

The last point I want to touch on is specific to saison and other farmhouse-style beers. Be open to using the grains you have, but, as Gordon Strong so rightfully recommends, keep the original gravity low. These beers, with their diastatic-positive yeasts, create incredibly dry, low final gravity beers, and this is before they go into a barrel for aging. A 1.060 original gravity (OG) saison can turn into an 8%+ monster without batting a French eyelash. If you want to go the “super saison” route, by all means do, but know that you might be sacrificing the dry, subtle, nuanced beer that a barrel can produce. 

The following recipe has been scaled to 6 gallons (23 L) into the fermenter to allow for setting aside a top-off portion to account for barrel evaporation. Adjust your recipe as needed based on your equipment profile and preferred ABV. Also, don’t be hesitant to use other ingredients (rye, oats, etc.) as this is a farmhouse style ale and takes well to ingredient swapping. Have fun, be creative, and enjoy your own fauxlera-process beer! 

Barrel-aged beers are some of the finest, most complex, and sought-after beers produced. Often imitated, though never truly replicated, oak barrels provide characteristics that are otherwise unobtainable. These come from a slow ingress of oxygen to the aging beer, flavors and tannins from toasted oak, as well as character from the spirit or other beverage that was previously aged in the barrel.

Often requiring a minimum of a year in the barrel — and sometimes much more — the resulting beers undergo a loss of water through evaporation and gain additional alcohol and flavor from the spirit previously aged in the barrel. They regularly push double-digit alcohol levels and are bursting in flavors; perfect for slow sipping and deep contemplation. 

With the required investment in time, it’s important to get barrel aging right. So, with the help of four professionals who regularly release some of the best wood-aged examples around, we explore the technique of barrel aging. Let’s meet the pros:

Corey Artanis: Co-Founder and Director of Brewing and Blending at 3 Sons Brewing Co. (Dania Beach, Florida)

Sean Buchan: Co-Founder and CEO at Cerebral Brewing (Denver, Colorado)

Paul Grenier: Co-Owner and CEO at Mortalis Brewing Co. (Avon, New York)

Jordan Ziegler: Vintage Barrel Master at Firestone Walker Brewing Co. (Paso Robles, California)

How big is your barrel program and what styles have you barrel-aged? 

Corey: We average an annual production of 150 barrels. We generally barrel-age stouts and barleywines, but have aged a Baltic porter, strong ale, imperial sour, and we currently have a wild ale in wine barrels.

Sean: We have 130 barrels in our clean program and 35 in our wild program, along with two 15-bbl mixed-culture foeders. The bulk of our barrel aging program is focused on barrel-aged imperial stouts, but we also dabble in barrel-aged barleywines as well as saison and other wild ales. Recently we’ve been enjoying working with barrel-aged lagers. In 2022, we took home a gold medal at the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers for a Chardonnay barrel-aged helles (check out a clone recipe for this beer below). As one of our favorite adjuncts, we’re always experimenting with new and unique barrel blends.

Paul: We have around 50 barrels right now and we are aging everything from imperial stouts to barleywines and even some fruited sours.

Jordan: We currently have a little over 1,000 casks filled in our program, which is roughly about 1,650 barrels in liquid. Over the years the styles that we have aged in barrels range from imperial stouts, milk stouts, imperial brown ale, smoked porter, blonde barleywine, imperial extra special bitter, browniewine, Munichwine, wheatwine, Baltic porter, Belgian quadrupel, and even Oktoberfest that is aged in wine barrels (BYO ran a clone recipe for Oaktoberfest in the March-April 2023 issue, online at: www.byo.com/recipe/firestone-walker-brewing-co-s-oaktoberfest-clone).

What attributes does barrel-aging add to a beer? 

Corey: So many! Each depending on what previously aged in the barrel and for how long, the type of wood the barrels are made of, barrel size, char level, and how long you rest the beer in the barrel. All of these variables will enhance the flavor profile, aroma, and texture of the beer in
different ways. 

Sean: When we choose to age a beer in a barrel we’re typically looking for three things — spirit character (assuming it’s a freshly dumped barrel), oak, and micro-oxidation. All three of these elements take time to develop, so it’s important to taste along the way in order to track them. Barrel age statements will have significant impacts on both spirit and oak, so it’s important to know what was aging in the barrel beforehand and for how long. Micro-oxidation is our tool to round out the sharp edges on our beer and develop deep, complex flavors, but if left for too long this can become a detriment.

Paul: That really depends on the barrel. You can get everything from cherry, oak, extreme tannins, vanilla, and so on. I think the better question is what attributes you are looking for, because I bet you could find a barrel to add those flavors!

Jordan: Oh, man. Where to start, ha! The beers that we design for barrel aging come out of the fermenter a bit blocky and rough around the edges but end up rounded out and balanced after resting in barrels for 12 months or longer. The char from the barrel offers carbon filtration of the beer as it rests over time. After 2–4 months you can notice a significant ABV increase from the booze inside the barrel, usually around 2–5% by volume depending on how freshly dumped the barrel was by the distillery. Around the 6–12 month mark you start to see the compounds from the oak start to shine: Vanillin provides notes of natural vanilla, lactones (trans and cis) give us notes of coconut. Furfurals (5-methyl and 5-hydroxymethyl) give off notes of toasted bread, butterscotch, and caramel. Finally, eugenols (trans and cis) give off hints of spice and clove. 

What checks and preparation do you put barrels through prior to filling them with beer? 

Corey: We buy our barrels from reputable brokers who put the barrels through a series of tests and fortunately we don’t have many issues with them. When we receive our barrels, we make sure the bungs haven’t been knocked out and there’s no serious physical damage. If the barrels have to sit for several weeks, we will rehydrate them by standing them up on their head, soak with hot water for 10–15 minutes, flip over and repeat to the other end. The biggest issue we’ve had with barrels are the ones with head bungs (rum and brandy barrels). It’s always good to add some barrel wax around a head bung before you fill them as a precaution. 

Sean: We typically receive freshly dumped barrels and aim to fill them as quickly as possible. Before filling, we give each barrel a once-over to ensure there is no structural damage that could cause problems for us later and a quick sensory evaluation after we take the bung out. After that we’re good to purge them with CO₂ and fill with beer.

Paul: Getting them fresh is super important. After you work with a trusted broker for some time you can eliminate some variables like if the broker does pressure testing, but we always test the barrel heads for a while to make sure they can hold liquid on top of the barrel and it’s not soaking into the barrel.

Jordan: I usually start with a visual inspection on the outside of the barrel for cracks in the staves or gaps in the heads where the chime and croze meet. If I find anything that I suspect will leak liquid I can use wax or putty to seal it up. A hot rinse goes a long way to not only swell the barrel staves, but to get rid of any mold and grime that’s on the outside of the barrel during aging at the distillery. After the hot rinse I take a pitcher mixed with iodine and water and scrub the area surrounding the wooden bung, followed by a few heavy sprays of 70% isopropyl. This allows me to sanitarily remove the wooden bung to inspect the inside of the barrel and insert a new rubber bung before filling with beer. 

What’s the typical lifespan of a barrel that arrives at your brewery look like?

Corey: We only use them once here. Not to say you can’t use them more than once, but that’s our practice. 

Sean: Most barrels are only used once in our clean barrel program. American oak whiskey/Bourbon barrels are much more porous and thus, allow more oxygen ingress than French oak wine barrels. That extra oxygen can lead to off-flavors like acetic acid in mixed-culture beers, so we typically don’t move them to our wild program after they’ve finished aging a barrel-aged stout or barleywine. Wine barrels in our wild program, on the other hand, will get used until we’re not happy with the character of the culture within it — often seeing 4–6 uses before they’re retired. We could easily go beyond that in many cases, but we’re constrained on space, so we’ll often retire barrels to allow us to bring in fresh barrels with more
wine character.

Paul: The vast majority of our barrels are single use and don’t get reused in the aging process. However, if we find something special or are looking for a special flavor, we have been known to double barrel a beer or swap barrels in the process.

Jordan: Spirit barrels are only filled once with beer. We usually sell our spent spirit barrels to a cooperage or a broker once emptied, or we give them away to fellow employees for miscellaneous projects. We also use medium-toast American oak barrels to ferment our Unfiltered Double Barrel Ale in the Firestone Walker Union system, and each barrel can be filled up to 32x times before being retired and considered “neutral.” Once the Union barrels are considered neutral, we ship them down to our sour facility (Firestone Walker Barrelworks) for sour beer production. 

When in the process do you add the beer to barrel? 

Corey: We transfer our stouts and barleywines to the barrels after the beer has reached terminal gravity and post centrifuge.

Sean: On our clean side, we go through primary fermentation then transfer to a brite tank for conditioning for an additional week or so. At that point we begin to check cell counts and when we’re below 5–10 million cells/mL we’re ready to fill.

The process is quite different for our wild beers. We have some that are barrel-fermented and others that see a primary fermentation in stainless with Saccharomyces, then see the addition of one of our mixed-cultures at the point of filling. It’s one of the reasons we love our wild program so much — there are so many individual variables you can change to achieve different results.

Paul: After we have checked the barrel and it meets our standards, the beer can be added. This happens after final fermentation is completed. We typically do not ferment in barrels.

Jordan: Cold side. I like to crash cool/condition the beer for at least five days before sending it to barrel. Crashing the beer will allow yeast and trub to settle out, and I like to dump that stuff out of the tank the day before filling barrels to avoid developing off-flavors or autolysis during the aging process. 

What is the range of time you’ve aged beer in barrel, and what factors impact that time?

Corey: We typically age our stouts and barleywines 18–28 months. The biggest factor is flavor pickup. The beer is ready when it tastes ready. 

Sean: We currently have one Bourbon barrel that’s been home to an imperial stout for nearly 60 months. While it’s certainly an outlier, we do tend to target longer aged barrels for our imperial stout program. Our average age is around 24–28 months for most releases while our Endeavor bottle members are likely to see 30+ month age statements fairly frequently.

We live in a very dry climate so aging beer this long often leads to pretty significant loss. When we empty a 53-gallon (200-L) barrel after 2–3 years of aging we’re typically losing about 25% of the product that we put in.

Paul: We have learned so much over the years in this process. Especially when you consider so many variables like climate control, temperature change, age of the barrel, what’s going inside, what flavors are you looking for, who your barrel broker is, how fresh the barrel was. I could talk for hours on this because of the significant impact of these variables. For an imperial stout, we start looking at it after 14–18 months and see how it evolved over time and then try to plan a course after that.

Jordan: 12-24 months is our sweet spot for most of our barrel-aged beers, although we have gone longer. Since the Bourbon barrels allow micro-oxygenation into the beer, the more time in the barrel means more dissolved oxygen getting into the beer. At some point the compounds from the oak become saturated. In our experience, we seem to achieve our desired extraction from the barrel sometime in that second year in barrel. 

Is your barrel room temperature-controlled? What temperature range/humidity/etc. should a homebrewer try to achieve for barrel-aged beers?

Corey: Our barrel room temperature fluctuates between 75-85 °F (24–29 °C). No humidity control. When I used to barrel age my homebrew I really didn’t worry about temperature range/humidity/etc., mostly because the barrels I used were 5- to 15-gallons (19- to 57-L), so the time in barrel was quite short and those things didn’t affect the beer as much. I would definitely suggest aging at warmer temperatures vs. colder, if it’s an option. Also, if there’s somewhere you can age that has big swings in temperature from night-to-day, this will help expand and contract the beer inside the barrel, thus giving you more flavor pickup. 

Sean: Our barrel rooms are temperature controlled between 65–75 °F (18–24 °C), but that’s mostly due to the fact that they’re located in the same buildings as our taprooms. The temperature and humidity levels you target should be dictated by your goals for the beer. Larger temperature and humidity swings will cause the beer to pull into and out of the oak and often speeds up the development of barrel character. Smaller swings in those variables are going to keep the beer on a more consistent, but possibly slower, path to developing the flavor profiles you’re after.

Paul: Our barrel aging facility is not really temperature controlled. We really love it when the warmer months expand the oak staves to absorb more beer and when the colder months contract to push that beer back into the barrel carrying with it some of those amazing flavors in that oak.

Jordan: We keep our barrel room at 50 °F (10 °C) all year round. Keeping our barrel room at a constant temperature eliminates temperature fluctuations and contracts the barrel, allowing the beer to penetrate deeper into the staves for a cleaner extraction. As a homebrewer I would just try to keep it in a cool, dark place that has the least amount of temperature fluctuations. 

Have you used oak spirals/cubes/other barrel alternatives to amplify the oak character when barrels go neutral (or for other reasons)? 

Corey: Negative. I have used some spent Black Swan honeycomb barrels for aging and they were quite nice. Black Swan mills a honeycomb-like pattern in the barrel staves to increase the internal surface area, thus speeding up the aging process. 

Sean: We’ve used amburana (a Brazilian hardwood) spirals with great success several times. These were added to the brite tank after barrel aging to add additional character. While we could source amburana barrels, they’re extremely expensive and it’s much easier to dial in the desired flavor profile on an intense wood type like amburana using something like spirals.

Paul: Our current process really doesn’t utilize cubes or spirals. We have found the best results come with time and fresh barrel selection.

Jordan: We use a lot of different oak spirals, staves, and barrel bung inserts to amplify our beers. I just made a beer called ParAmburana that I infused with amburana oak from Brazil, which gave off a lot of confectionary notes like gingerbread, snickerdoodle cookies, and autumn spices to the beer. I am also working on a triple-oaked barleywine that has been aged in rye whiskey barrels with single-forest French oak barrel bung inserts added, and then finished in red wine French oak barrels. The possibilities are endless with wood products. 

What should homebrewers keep in mind when working with smaller (5-15 gallon/19–57 L) barrels?

Corey: On 5-gallon (19-L) barrels I would taste a sample two weeks in and continue to taste every 4–5 days thereafter until you’re happy. With 10- to 15-gallon (38- to 57-L) barrels I would usually taste a month in and every week thereafter. Lastly, source local/fresh barrels whenever possible!

Sean: The most important thing to consider with barrel sizes is that the smaller you go, the larger the surface area-to-beer ratio. This means you’ll have a much more significant flavor impact on a beer aged in smaller barrels than you will one aged in a larger one. Sometimes this can give you your desired flavor profile faster, but it can also lead to over-extraction and ruin the balance of your beer if you
aren’t careful.

Paul: We still use some smaller format barrel today! Those 5- to 15-gallon (19- to 57-L) barrels are awesome; the best advice I could give is that they take less time and to taste them often. Usually, you get a lot of spirit flavors from them depending on the previous occupant, so it’s important to understand that when crafting those liquids going inside.

Jordan: Unfortunately, I do not have any experience aging beer in 5-15 gallon barrels. I, personally, would use oak staves to infuse my homebrew at that scale. You can get some decent oak character after aging on staves for 6–8 weeks. 

Other than stouts in Bourbon barrels, are there other beer style/barrel combinations that you’re particularly fond of?

Corey: Barleywine in Bourbon barrels!

Sean: We love playing with specialty barrels for our imperial stouts — some of our favorites include rum, apple brandy, BLiS Maple Syrup Bourbon, and XO Cognac. On the mixed-culture side, we’ve really enjoyed the interplay of saison with the herbal elements of spirits like Rhum Agricole and Tomcat Gin.

Paul: We love our rum barrels at Mortalis. Nothing gets me going quite like designing a new Tiki cocktail in beer format with a Hydra base. We have also been known to dabble with pear brandy from time to time as well.

Jordan: Barleywines aged in rye whiskey barrels have really caught my attention lately. I like to work with barleywines because they tend to have varying levels of sweetness and malt depth, which makes them a great candidate for blending. You can blend in a sweeter beer to amplify another beer that seems too dry or lacking definition on the finish. 

What qualities in a beer make it a good candidate for barrel aging?

Corey: I like a lower roast stout with higher final gravity (FG). I feel the lower level of roast is more approachable/palatable and the higher FG will help balance the alcohol pickup from the barrel. So, use debittered roasted malts as a substitute for black malt and roasted barley. You also want to keep your IBUs on the lower side for balance; 40–45, sometimes lower. Play around with it.

Sean: The key to designing beers for successful barrel aging is planning for the future. Our barrel-aged stouts, for example, are designed with more hop bitterness and roasted black or chocolate malts knowing that the bitterness will fade over time and the roasted flavors will mellow out and become more complex. We purposefully design our clean barrel-aged beers to have harder edges at first, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t love how your beer tastes going into barrel. Off-flavors do not, however, diminish with age — so make sure your fermentation is healthy and complete.

Paul: Gravity is super important in this process. Understand that barrel aging can thin a beer out and that it might not have quite the viscosity it had going into the barrel as coming out of the barrel so plan accordingly and brew a thick beer to help it survive the long slumber.

Jordan: I aim to have the finishing gravity on my barrel beers to stall out significantly higher than a normal beer, usually around the 8–14 degrees Plato (1.032-1.056 specific gravity). I feel it’s important to have some sweetness and malt depth to balance out the flavors imparted from the barrel. You also want to have a higher ABV going into the barrel compared to most normal homebrews. Alcohol is one of the main drivers behind the extraction of the compounds from the oak, the more ABV going in means more extraction. 

When do you make adjunct additions (whether it’s coffee, fruit, or a full-on pastry stout) in barrel-aged beers?

Corey: For adjunct beers we add everything post barrel aging. I feel tasting a beer after aging gives me a clearer picture of what adjuncts will pair best with the final blend, or unblended flavor profile of the beer. Viscosity, oak, roast, alcohol, and sweetness all play big rolls when deciding adjuncts.

Sean: Nearly all of our adjunct additions are post barrel aging, with the exception of vanilla. Vanilla beans are hand-processed and dosed in the barrel, typically at a rate of 0.5–1 lb. (220–450 g) per oak barrel. This allows for greater exposure time and, ultimately, a more nuanced and complex vanilla character. Adjuncts like coconut, cacao nibs, nuts (almond, macadamia, pecans, etc.) are all added post barrel aging in our adjunct dosing vessel. This tank is essentially a mobile brite tank with a false bottom that allows us to steep or recirculate on ingredients without clogging our pump. Coffee gets the same treatment but we get the beer as cold as we can in order to limit oxidation-derived off-flavors (think green pepper/jalapeño). 

Adding ingredients post barrel aging allows us to maximize their impact and achieve a much fresher flavor profile of your targeted adjuncts.

Paul: 95% of those additions are done after the barrel aging process is complete for us. This really allows you more control of flavors you want to bring to the beer without going too far in one direction and not being able to come back.

Jordan: We add our adjuncts post barrel aging. A lot of the aromas from the adjuncts are very volatile and are usually the first to fade over time. I want to add them on the back end so I can allow them as much opportunity to be bright and aromatic. I feel like if you were to add adjuncts prior to aging they can become over extracted or even muted. Our preferred method is steeping/recirculating the adjuncts, which allows us to monitor the progress and taste each addition along the way.

On to the Recipes

We’ve soaked up a lot of advice from our pros, and now it’s time to put it to use. Following are clone recipes graciously provided to us by each of these brewers. While each is aged in barrel at the commercial level, and intended as such even for smaller batches, homebrewers have the option of going the easier route of using oak alternatives. 

If you don’t have a barrel but want to brew oak-aged beer, barrel alternatives are great options, as these two experts share.

Jamil Zainasheff is an award-winning brewer, author, beer judge, and podcaster.

I have used granules, chips, cubes, sticks, spirals, staves, as well as small and large barrels. There are even extracts that you can use to dose a beer. Generally, the smaller the format of the wood (e.g., granules versus cubes) means more surface area in contact with the beer and quicker extraction. While quicker extraction might be useful in some circumstances, more important is the quality of the wood and the quality of the process used to make it. My favorite is spirals from The Barrel Mill, which I have used extensively. This format is easy to use and much easier to remove from the beer when done. Spirals come in various lengths and they are easy to break into shorter pieces if needed.

In general, American oak has a bolder flavor with more vanilla notes. French oak has a more subtle oak flavor and an overall sweeter impression. Hungarian oak has what some consider to be smooth or more subtle vanilla notes. Regardless of the origin, those flavors of vanilla, caramel, and butter-
scotch depend on the toast or char level. Firing the wood creates melanoidins as heat from the fire breaks down carbohydrates into sugars. It is toast or char that creates flavors ranging from light vanilla to espresso and more. 

My go-to favorite is a blend of light-toast American and medium toast French oak, but I also really like using Spanish cedar, cypress, sugar maple, and amburana. The only problem with some of these wood species is that they are available in limited formats.

If you are new to wood aging beer, start with higher-alcohol beers (>9% ABV), as they will not sour as quickly should there be bacteria or wild yeast introduced with the wood. Imperial stouts are always great with wood aging. The residual sweetness is a nice counterbalance to the tannins from the wood, and any vanilla and caramel notes from the wood are nice with the chocolaty notes of the stout. 

I also like wood-aged Pilsner, golden ale, Kölsch, or hefeweizen with woods like Spanish cedar, cypress, sugar maple, and amburana. You can try wood with anything. Using chips or cubes, you could experiment with just a growler or Mason jar of beer to see how well a particular wood affects the flavor. If you like it, then you can age the rest of the beer. 

Longer extraction times create different flavors in the beer. The general consensus is that the beers can become more tannic with longer extraction times. Taste the beer each week to see how it is progressing. Once the flavor is right, get the beer off the wood. One trick to maximize extraction and reduce waiting time is to recirculate the beer across the wood. Commercially, they use a pump, but homebrewers can swirl the vessel or invert the keg every few days to accelerate and maximize extraction.

I don’t recommend soaking oak alternatives in a spirit in hopes of replicating the flavor from a spirit barrel. The oxidation and development of flavors over time in the wood is not something you can recreate in a sealed bottle over a short time. Instead, soaking the wood in the spirit leaches out the wood flavor you want to add to your beer. You might as well just pour the spirit into the beer instead. If you do soak the wood in a spirit, then consider pouring all of that spirit into the beer too, so you retain the wood flavor. Some folks soak their wood in a spirit hoping it will kill any organisms present, but that is not a good reason to do it either. Heat, in the oven or through canning, is the best option for ensuring sanitary wood products.

Desi Hall is a sales associate with The Barrel Mill in Avon, Minnesota.

When choosing barrel alternatives, the first thing I consider is availability: Can I get these again if I like them, and how consistent is the product? I also consider volume displacement for the vessel I am using (do I have enough room to add the amount of the alternative I need to achieve the contact rate for aging?). And clean-up: How much work is it to get the alternative out of the vessel? Toast level is another consideration. Lighter toast tends to give the perception of fruit while the darker toast lends more sweet notes (caramel, butterscotch, toffee).

When you’re looking for the added flavor and complexity of a spirit along with the oak you should remember to drink the premium spirits and use a good-quality budget brand for soaking your oak alternative. Use the smallest vessel possible to soak a spiral and use only enough liquid to saturate the spiral. The goal is to add spirits to the spiral without leaving anything behind in the soaking vessel, but if there is some left behind it can be added as a liquid oak extract or tossed out.

When considering contact time, depending on the species of wood, you can achieve the desired flavor in as little as 24 hours, but in most cases four weeks will give full extraction from a spiral. Something I tell everyone that wants to use any barrel alternative is to always taste it early and taste it often. Many times brewers get bad results because they wait too long to take the first sample and end up over-oaking.

You can get the oak and spirit flavors from alternatives, but the thing you don’t get compared to a barrel is oxygenation. Oxygen has a large effect on the final taste, aroma, and mouthfeel of the finished beverage. There has been a lot of experimentation around micro-oxygenation, and by forcing oxygen into the solution we can get much closer to resembling a barrel.

Of course, barrel alternatives go beyond oak. One of my favorite combinations currently is a pale ale aged on Spanish cedar. The Spanish cedar adds notes of citrus, grapefruit peel, and a light spice.  

Q: Can I do a solera project in a 10-gallon (38-L) barrel without bugs or am I missing the point?
— Mike Biel • Kenosha, Wisconsin

A: Quick definition for our readers: The solera process is a type of fractional blending used to produce a diverse range of aged liquids including Sherry, vinegar, wine, whiskey, and beer. The term solera comes from solum, loosely meaning “ground” or “bedrock.” The solera system consists of multiple layers of barrels called criaderas, with each layer representing a blend component, usually a harvest year of the final blend that happens in the bottom layer of barrels. Because the barrels are at the lowest level, i.e., the ground level, of the system, they are called soleras. Etymology aside, there is absolutely nothing in the rulebook that states that your solera project must include bugs, bacteria, or funky yeast related to how some sour beer brewers operate their solera systems.

According to the books, the main reason that this system was originally developed was to improve the consistency of Sherry. By definition, Sherry must be aged for at least three years. As such, a common method for Sherry production is to annually transfer about a third of each barrel in the system. This transfer process begins at the bottom by bottling a portion of the solera and replacing by re-filling the solera with the criadera one tier up, then refilling that criadera from a level up, until the top criadera is then filled with new product.

The other rule related to your question is the number of layers and the number of barrels: No rule exists! You can indeed use the solera process using a single barrel so that every year you have a bottling of one-year product blended over the age of your solera. In practice, it does make sense to do something other than aging beer in a solera system (or single-barrel solera) because the oak characters are going to quickly fade as the solera is used for multiple bottlings. You could move aged beer into a new barrel, but if your solera system consists of only one barrel this process would put in a kink in the whole consistency idea. Whatever the master plan, the solera system is a pretty nifty method with lots of fun and interesting applications — no bugs required!

You’ve just opened up your small brewery. You’re on top of the world, making IPAs for the masses and a delicate Italian Pilsner for your own personal consumption. You’ve mastered the main skill of a brewer, which is cleaning and sanitation. And now you’re ready to throw some of that out of the window and start making some exotic, slow-selling projects aged in oak barrels. Good for you. Get out there and get crazy with it, but here is a brief primer that just might help you make better beer without a multi-year learning curve.

1. Overall mindset

In many ways, making barrel-aged beer is just like making all-steel beer. Your job is to make your vision come to life and that involves most of the same principles. Keep everything as clean as possible. Keep oxygen away from your beer. Monitor it over time. Barrels aren’t some magical unicorn that will take a subpar beer and make it great. Once you put beer into oak barrels, you’re embracing the chaos factor. You’re inviting a higher risk of infection, oxidation, and plain old bad beer, so don’t forget the basics of brewing just because barrels are involved.

2. The fifth ingredient in your beer

Pay as much attention to those barrels as you would to your grist bill or hop varieties and build your recipe so that all the ingredients work in harmony. For example, the tannins in most oak barrels will add astringency and the bitterness from high IBUs can be astringent, which is why you rarely see fresh oak-aged IPAs. Bourbon barrels will come with some inherent sweetness from vanillin, so you can adjust your final gravity accordingly.

Once you put beer into oak barrels, you’re embracing the chaos factor.

As for the actual barrels — a direct connection with a local distillery or winery is optimal. If not, there are great barrel brokers across the country. Just remember that you might not be able to inspect those barrels until they’re at your door. If that’s the case, open them up as soon as they get to you. You have three basic things to inspect.

Aroma

If you ordered some Bourbon barrels and they smell like Bourbon, then Yahtzee! You’re probably good and you’ll end up getting a lovely combination of vanilla, coconut, and charred oak. If that aroma is mild or seems off in some way, maybe you can make changes to your recipe and make up for any shortcomings.

Visual

Look in every barrel with a flashlight. Over the years I’ve inspected thousands of barrels and in that time I’ve found (among other things) a dead frog, a dead snake, and an empty but intact 24 oz. aluminum can. Somewhere out there a cooper must have taken off a barrel head and the can fell in. That person didn’t notice, put the head back on, and then filled it with rum. And for all we know, the ink that leeched off of that can made the best rum ever . . . maybe . . . probably not.

Barrel integrity

Sometimes barrels will show up at your door and your beer isn’t ready yet. Without some work those barrels could dry out, the staves could contract, the hoops fall off, and now you just have firewood and painful hula hoops. The basic goal is this: Maintain structural integrity without leeching out any of the flavor you’re trying to get from that barrel. There are chemical solutions, sulfur sticks (safety note — NEVER burn a sulfur stick in a barrel that most recently held spirits), steaming, and other methods that would require their own article.

For these reasons I usually go with watering externally. As an example, we recently acquired some Scotch barrels that spent extra time on the ocean, so they were drier than expected and the aroma was muted. We did not want to fill those barrels with water for fear of extracting what flavor was left. So we alternated between spraying the barrels on the racks and setting them up vertically so we could fill one of the barrel heads like a little swimming pool. When we finally filled those barrels two months later every barrel held and we didn’t sacrifice anything from flavortown.

3. Filling Barrels

The filling part is the easiest part of the process. The goal is simply to keep oxygen out of there, just like any other vessel. An extended purge is best but at least get a layer of CO₂ at the bottom of the barrel. It’s heavier than air, so having that blanket down there and a nice, laminar flow will gently push that blanket up while you fill. Any basic steel tube with a sight glass will do the job nicely. So now you’ve responsibly filled your purged barrels. Congratulations! The next three tips will help with the most common question people ask me — how do you know when it’s ready?

4. Aging something in barrels longer does not necessarily make it better

“The longer you age it, the better it gets.” This is one of those lasting myths. And of course longer aging sounds sexy. But with many spirits and beers I’m looking for big, vibrant, barrel-aged flavors and don’t want oxidation to mitigate that. In general you can extract almost all of the flavor from a Bourbon barrel in 2–3 months. Anything after that can open the door for oxidation, infection, or worse.

This is certainly not the only way to do things — some highly respected breweries have a certain amount of desirable sherry-like oxidation as a goal, while some other breweries manipulate their beers to have an extremely high final gravity in order to meld harmoniously with that longer aging. So there’s no “one right way” to do things when it comes to barrel-aging, but in every case these breweries are making conscious decisions about their processes and every one of those brewers knows that older is not always better.

5. Be aware of your ambient temperature and humidity

Unless you have a climate-controlled warehouse or an underground cave, geography matters. The brewery I work for resides in Colorado, which is technically a desert. So some barrels, even after as little as 4–5 months, can dry out on top and create gaps in the staves. Then oxygen floods in and the off-flavor party starts.

Also remember that oak is porous. Evaporation through that wood is happening at all times and evaporation accelerates in an environment with low humidity and high heat. In a recent project, the best place to put four barrels was right by glass garage doors in the summer. The higher temperatures meant losing an extra five gallons (19 L) from each 53-gallon (200-L) barrel after only three months of aging. We anticipated this and pulled the beer out before the barrels could dry out and anything could oxidize. While more climate control could be an option, I’ve made a conscious decision to alter the amount of time in barrels based on the natural environment. It takes a little more care and monitoring, but also could be considered a sort of “terroir.”

6. How do I really know when to take the beer out?

First, monitor those barrels. Frequent tasting isn’t only useful, it’s also much more fun than scrubbing floors. Enjoy it. For sampling, some brewers use a wine thief to extract samples from the top of the barrel. Most use what’s become known as the “Vinnie Nail,” an homage to Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, California. As one of the OGs of barrel aging in the U.S., he graciously shared some of his methods with the industry. In this case, you drill a hole into the head of the barrel and put a stainless steel nail into the hole. This makes it simple to pull that nail and take samples whenever you want.

One obstacle is that barrel-aged beer is warm and flat and sometimes it’s useful to try it cold and carbonated so you can be confident that the project is finished. For this, keep a handful of CarbaCaps around. That’s a $15 plastic cap that you can attach to most soda bottles. Then you attach a ball-lock connector to your CO₂ supply and you can carbonate a cold sample in less than a minute. This also makes it easy to do different blends of barrels and try them next to each other in essentially “finished” form.

After all of that, keep it simple — you know when to take it out when it tastes great to you. One of the common mistakes is to taste a barrel, think it’s great, and then decide to wait another few months to see if it might get even better. Don’t wait for that beer to maybe get five percent better. In my experience there’s a better chance of something going wrong than improving. Even your 12% ABV, non-sour, barrel-aged beer is susceptible to infection, to oxidation, or to some random customer deciding they want to look in the barrel. Get excited, get it out of that barrel, get it on tap, and get it into your customers’ flavor holes. Unless, of course, something tastes . . . off.

7. Don’t be afraid to dump barrels

We’re into the chaos now. You put beer in barrels. You’re having fun, but you’re also the most critical person tasting your beer. But it can be easy to start making excuses. It’s not that bad, you spent time on it, you spent money on it, you’re emotionally invested in this project . . . we all know how it goes. So remember — just like every good all-steel brewer dumps beer sometimes, same thing with every good barrel-aging brewer. So what is the best way to put those emotions aside and evaluate your beer as honestly as possible? Sensory training.

Even if you’ve done some sensory training for all-steel beers and you’re acquainted with basics like diacetyl, acetaldehyde, trans-2 nonenal, and hydrogen sulfide, there’s more to learn. The barrel aging world has its own compounds that deserve attention. Oxidation can appear as a delightful Port aroma or an astringent ashtray. Non-sour barrels can become infected, leading to an array of diacetyl (butter), acetic acid (vinegar), ethyl acetate (paint thinner), and so forth. With these descriptive terms it seems like we’d all recognize them immediately, but that’s not always the case. I’ve bought more than a few barrel-aged beers, labeled as either sour or non-sour, that are basically undrinkable ethyl acetate.

A little training goes a long way towards making great beer. Everyone’s palate is different, we can all taste different things, and it can take some work to analyze your own strengths and weaknesses. Through training, I know that I’m almost completely blind to a compound called butyric acid. It tastes like baby vomit and even at six times the normal human threshold I can’t detect it. I’ve been in a training room where my fellow tasters were gagging from the aroma and it tasted like the control sample to me. That’s great knowledge. I know that I should never release a sour beer with myself as the only taster and that has helped me be confident in releasing every project I’ve been a part of.

The timing of this piece was great since this week we were set to empty four barrels of a doppelbock in rye barrels. As of a month ago all four barrels tasted great. In trying them all again right before debarreling one had developed some medium level ethyl acetate (paint thinner). We did some quick blends, and while blending that fourth barrel in only made a minor difference in flavor and aroma, I made the call to dump it.

Why? Because I almost never see ethyl acetate problems in non-sour barrels. It’s almost always sour beer. Ethyl acetate is created when acetic acid and ethanol mix. And the presence of acetic acid means that Acetobacter, which is everywhere, was given a chance to flourish. Acetobacter just needs oxygen and ethanol to start making acetic acid.

So why did this happen? Most likely because we ran out of doppelbock during the filling of this barrel and ended up adding 15-ish gallons (57 L) of a Baltic porter we had around. The extra time and shenanigans involved likely means that extra oxygen went into this barrel. That oxygen triggered the Acetobacter, which progressed to ethyl acetate.

While I can only make a logical guess to all of that, the conclusion is that the barrel was infected and blending it with the other three barrels might have meant infecting the whole batch. Maybe keeping the blended beer chilled and carbonated would have mitigated the acetic/ethyl acetate production, but I don’t want to take that risk. So this hits on several of the tips in the article: Keep oxygen out, monitor flavors, sensory training, and don’t be afraid to dump barrels.

8. Equipment for emptying barrels

For extracting beer from the barrels you’re looking for a piece of equipment that works just like a portable keg spear. It goes into the bunghole of the barrel, seals it with a rubber or silicone stopper, then pushes CO₂ in through the top and extracts the beer from the bottom. I’ve used two main versions of this equipment and each can work well for different operations.

The most common no-frills option is best known as the Bulldog, though there are similar options on the market. A Bulldog racking cane has a steel tube, sealing mechanism, CO₂ port, sight glass, and a valve. If the goal is just to empty a handful of barrels occasionally, this will do everything you need. The one caveat is a potential safety issue. You’re putting CO₂ into a vessel that does not have a pressure gauge or a pressure relief valve, so you don’t truly know what’s happening in there. It is possible to overpressurize a barrel and the head can shoot off. This is a very rare situation and at a small operation you’ll be monitoring the operation at all times. But if something goes wrong it would be catastrophic.

If you’re planning on expanding your program, the Rack-it-Teer is worth the extra funds. It has a more flexible sealing mechanism, a small cup at the bottom to help prevent charred oak from getting into the tank, a pressure gauge, and a pressure relief valve. Your beer yield might go up slightly, but the safety aspect is critical if you’re running a larger operation and need to multitask at all times.

And one small addition that can save a lot of trouble . . . many years ago I was debarreling around 50 Bourbon barrels into a conical tank and after around 20 barrels things just stopped moving. I took the debarreling rig apart and checked every valve. Then I checked the tank. Turns out that I had vastly underestimated the amount of charred oak in that barrel, and the conical tank was plugged with chunks of oak. Not just little floating bits, chunks of oak. Enough that liquid wouldn’t go through.

So it’s common practice to put something inline to filter out that charred oak. A large operation can repurpose a hopback, but for smaller operations all you need is an inexpensive “sock screen gasket.” It’s a tube of stainless steel mesh attached to a rubber gasket, and will fit perfectly into the sight glass on a Bulldog or Rack-it-Teer. If you’re worried about overloading it, put valves on both sides for easy removal and cleaning.

9. How many times can you use a barrel?

As a general rule, for a vast majority of spirits/wine barrels, you have one shot to get the delicious impact of that previous beverage. Whenever I’ve tried to age something a second time I might get a hint of that spirit, but I’m hesitant to call that second round a “Bourbon Barrel-Aged Beer.” If I can only taste a hint of those flavors that would seem like false advertising to me. If you’re intent on reusing those barrels, just make sure you’re accurately describing the eventual beer when you put it up for sale. As an example of this, years ago Goose Island Brewery made a beer called King Henry. They said right on the label that it was a barleywine aged in barrels that previously held Bourbon County Stout.

Great beer and they advertised it truthfully. I knew going in that it would have hints of vanilla and coconut and charred oak without being major players in the flavor party. The one exception I’ve found to this rule is smoky Scotch barrels . . . that polarizing flavor can be used two or three times. They’re the gift that keeps on giving. And yes, you can repurpose these barrels to house sour beer, but that’s a tale for another day.

Aging hard cider in oak barrels or on oak alternatives adds flavors, aromas, and unique complexities otherwise unobtainable in cider. If that oak previously held another spirit or wine (or was soaked in it, in terms of an oak alternative), the impact these products impart is even greater. Get in on the fun with the advice from two pros with massive barrel programs and years of experience.

Rick Hastings is Founder, Co-Owner, and Head Cidermaker at Liberty Ciderworks in Spokane, Washington. 

Before you begin, it’s important to identify what you’re looking to achieve with oak aging. That, plus the characteristics of the cider in question, should guide your decision-making. At Liberty, we barrel-age for three main reasons, often with some overlap: 

1) To introduce flavors from used spirit barrels.

2) To introduce oak notes and tannins.

3) To bulk age, allowing the cider to develop and mature with the type of micro-oxygenation afforded by oak barrels.

As a rule of thumb, nearly any type of cider can work when the objective is about marrying flavors — assuming the flavors are complementary, of course. But we generally steer clear of trying to bulk age modern-style ciders in oak, reserving that for ciders featuring our cider-specific varietals. In short, dessert apples are generally best for ciders intended to be packaged and drunk fresh, while ciders with lots of tannic structure are the best candidates for oak aging. 

We’ve had great success with wheat whiskey barrels from our local producer, Dry Fly Distillery. These are American oak, with a heavy #3-char. We’ve also had good results with gin and Bourbon barrels from Dry Fly, the former especially with lighter-bodied ciders. For our spirits-influenced products, we usually get just one cycle per barrel. After that, we re-use them as “neutral” barrels for long-term aging. 

When seeking fresh oak character we often utilize oak chips instead of new barrels. This provides more control than we’d get otherwise, both in terms of the type of oak and the degree of flavors developed. For such ciders, I’m partial to the vanilla notes typical of French oak. In fact, we use chips for one of our main-line products. When using them, chips are simply measured by weight, packaged loosely in mesh bags, and placed into our bulk aging tanks.

The time we leave the cider in a barrel depends on a few factors. For our whiskey-influenced line, three or four months is usually sufficient. For ciders needing other benefits, i.e., micro-oxygenation and/or malolactic fermentation, figure at least six months, keeping things topped off at all times, of course. Nearly all of our barrels are 55-gallon (200-L), so the timing may be different for smaller barrels homebrewers are more accustomed to. 

For us, barrels are best for aging, as we usually try to avoid the mess and hassles of barrel fermentation. Since we generally prefer not to age ciders on gross lees, we prefer to ferment in HDPE or stainless steel, transferring to barrels when we’re ready to age. 

Depending on your objectives and type of apples used, give chips or other barrel-alternatives a hard look. The benefits of barrel-aging are often easy to emulate, giving you the chance to experiment and learn before making the heavier investment involved with physical barrels.

Seth Boeve is the Head Cidermaker at Virtue Cider in Fennville, Michigan. 

A lot of what you have to consider when deciding whether to oak age a cider or not is dependent on your intent with the cider you’re making and what fruit you’re starting with. Oak adds a lot of depth and complexity to the flavor but also needs to be balanced. Here at Virtue Cider, we oak age almost everything we make but, as I said, that is an expression of our intent with our ciders. For example, with our Brut Cider, a percentage of it is aged in oak to add more complexity to the nice dry Michigan apple cider and help round off some of the intensity.

We predominantly use French oak for aging our Core Series of ciders, all of which previously held wine. A lot of them are Chardonnay barrels, which help balance out some of the higher acids you get from the fruit. Based on our experiences, we get more vanilla-type characteristics in the French oak, although we have also used some American oak Bourbon-aged barrels for some of our ciders, like The Mitten (which is a blend of last season’s pressed apples, aged in Bourbon barrels for up to one year, then backsweetened with this year’s fresh pressed apple juice).

We keep our French oak barrels for as long as we can. We even have some from when we opened the cider house eight years ago. New barrels have more aggressive oak character to add to the cider, but with older barrels they help in other ways as they soften. With spirit barrels we only use them to age once or twice. You really get the character of the spirit with first use and then the character of the barrel in the second use. Then we can blend from there to find the right balance.

How long to age cider in a barrel is dependent on the size of the barrel and the amount of influence you want. You’ll get more character and exposure on smaller barrels, which can also make the process go faster. Here at Virtue, we usually leave them for three months to a year.

We have not released any ciders at Virtue using oak alternatives yet, but we have done research into these products, and see a lot of potential. There are tons of oak alternatives that give lots of good oak character. My biggest suggestion for homebrewers would be to do your research and talk to your homebrew shop or oak alternative vendor.

We predominantly conduct our aging post-fermentation. We choose that route due to the consistency in results. You know what you have going in and you have a pretty good idea of what will then come out of the barrel at the end. Fermenting in the barrel is an option, but it is less predictable since the barrel itself is its own environment. However, fermenting in the barrel definitely can have its own upsides too as it does add more depth to cider. We’ll probably try out more in the future, but it takes you along for a bit more of an unexpected ride.

Oak aging is one of the most exciting aspects of the cider we make here. Some of the best ciders we make come out of oak as it complements the fruit so well. It’s a little more effort, risk, and requires a little more education on the cidermaker’s part, but I think it is totally worth it! I’d definitely recommend trying it out for yourself!

After a year of pandemic brewing many of us are looking for new ways to explore our hobby. One way to get creative could be starting a homebrew barrel program. While local homebrew supply stores carry cubes, chips, spirals, and other “oak alternative” products for wood aging, these all seem to fall short of the romance of placing your home-crafted ales into a full-sized barrel. The Morris Area Society of Homebrewers (MASH) in New Jersey has two barrel projects for club members to enjoy the mystique of barrel aging their beers while defraying some of the prohibitive costs tied to the process that an individual would have to invest if they went it alone.

The cost of a used or new barrel can be just as much as a top-of-the-line kettle. While most barrels used for brewing are discarded Bourbon barrels, there are also barrels for wine and other spirits available, some of which may be more common depending where you live. The increase in popularity of commercial barrel aging programs and whiskey production have steadily increased the cost of these once affordable barrels. Depending on the size and quality, the cost can run up to $250 dollars and a barrel transfer tool (also called a bulldog) can run an additional $250+  (no, a bulldog is not a necessity for barreled beers as siphoning through tubes will also work, but since our club purchased a bulldog I thought it worth mentioning). With the cost of a 5-gallon (19-L) grain bill and yeast running about $25, multiplied to fill a barrel this equates to over $250 dollars for the wort alone to fill a 53-gallon (200-L) barrel. Of course, this is quite a large amount of beer for an individual, and with the costs associated with these beers it generally adds up to dissuade even those most interested in full-sized barrel aging. 

Enter the MASH barrel share project, which makes the cost much more reasonable when it is spread across a group of club members. Using the barrel for consecutive fills diminishes the cost even more. One potential drawback is that with having several members contributing their fermented beers to the barrel there is an increased chance of introducing unwanted bacteria. This occurred in the club’s first barrel after the first fill. The second barrel has been kept “clean” by steaming between fills.  

The first barrel our club got our hands on was previously used by Heaven Hill Distillery and procured from Keystone Barrel Supply in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania. The second barrel was previously a wine barrel procured from Northeast Barrel Company in nearby Lansdale, Pennsylvania. These companies were used due to proximity to the club in northern New Jersey. Websites such as OakBarrel.com and Midwest Barrel Company have different selections of barrels, and there may be other used barrel distributors in your region. Your club’s location and willingness to cover shipping will determine the best company to go through. Another great option is to buy it direct from a distillery, winery, or brewery that may be retiring a barrel. The key is to get a barrel that has been recently emptied. A barrel that has been empty for a while may leak due to the staves having dried and contracted and will need to be expanded before you add any beer to be aged. Also, the longer a barrel sits empty the higher the likelihood unwanted funk will grow in the barrel. 

The club uses a barrel bulldog and a barrel steamer that is borrowed from Twin Elephant Brewery. Twin Elephant has had a long relationship with the club, serving as the primary location for club meetings before social distancing forced gatherings online. Barrel bulldogs, or gas transfer tools, can be purchased from brewing supply sites such as MoreBeer!, Homebrewers Outpost, or GW Kent. The club uses a steamer that is connected to a homemade ‘L’ shaped copper pipe. There are vent holes on the lower end of the ‘L’ shape that pump the steam into the empty barrel between fills. 

To offer ideas for your own club, let’s take a closer look at how MASH has utilized our two barrels.

Barrel 1

For the initial fill for barrel one back in 2015 all interested club members put their names in a lottery. The eleven members selected to contribute 5 gallons (19 L) of beer decided to brew an imperial stout. A common recipe was developed and each member brought their keg or carboy to fill the barrel on a designated day.

Unfortunately, after a few samplings during aging it was determined the barrel had gone sour and drove the second fill to be a Flanders red. Due to what was most likely impatience the members decided to do a solera pull at six months. After pulling some of the beer from the barrel, the same Flanders red recipe was brewed to top off the barrel again. After another six months the barrel was completely racked and refilled with an oud bruin. The oud bruin was aged in the barrel for one year and then the members chose to attempt a clone of the Tired Hands Orbison golden saison. During this refill the barrel was physically moved between club members’ homes. In February of 2019 a solera pull was made of the golden saison with a second pull in June of 2019. 

Just as the pandemic was starting the barrel members decided on a dark sour (a clone recipe of The Bruery’s Tart of Darkness). In April 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic caused a slight change for the barrel program. What was once an all-day social event where participating members gathered to collectively rack and refill the barrel had to change. The 2020 fill had all participants drop off their brewed dark sour for one member to rack and fill the barrel. All members later picked up their portion. 

In May of 2021 the social distance restrictions limited a full collection of barrel participants, but a few more were able to attend to help rack, refill, and provide emotional support for another Flanders red barrel fill. 

Barrel 2

Two years after starting the first barrel project, MASH ordered a second barrel to allow more members to participate. The second barrel selected was a wine barrel that members hoped would remain clean without the funk the first one developed. This meant that a full rack and refill as well as a deep steam clean would take place as part of preventing the barrel from going sour as long as possible. This provided some mid-barrel day activity of rolling the barrel around to get a good clean. 

Twelve participating club members brewed an imperial saison and let the collective brew rest in the barrel in March of 2017. By July the saison was deemed ready and a second fill of the barrel took place with a Belgian dark strong ale. This beer sat in the barrel for a year until it was replaced with a wheatwine in July of 2018. 

In January of 2019 the participating members brewed a Belgian triple for the fourth fill. For the fifth fill the club made a change to this barrel. The participating members brewed a golden ale and pitched Funk Weapon #3 from Bootleg Biology. This secondary yeast strain was intended to create a ripe tropical fruit flavor with aromas of strawberry, cherry, and tropical candy. This fill took place during the social distance requirements so, like Barrel 1, it was less of a social event. Most recently in May of 2021 the barrel was filled with a imperial Berliner weisse. 

Each barrel is stored at one of the contributing brewer’s homes based on storage availability. As expected life happens and the club has seen both barrels moved over the course of the club’s barrel program. The barrel sponsors are tasked with conducting the shepherding of the beer and barrel. This program allows up to 12 club members (brewing 5 gallons/19 L each, as we found it is safe to have a bit extra in case some brewers came up a little short) to experience the benefits of barrel-aged beers without having to purchase additional equipment, store a full-sized barrel, or monitor its progress in their homes. 

One of the club members with experience in barrel aging tastes the barrel at various stages and makes a determination when the barrel is ready. There is not an exact science to this; it is more of a testing until it’s determined to be ready. 

Filling the Barrel 

Once the barrels arrived they were inspected to make sure there were no cracks or obvious leaks. Prior to filling with beer the barrels were filled with warm water over 170 °F (77 °C). After the barrel was filled a second inspection was done to look for leaks. The barrel should sit for up to 24 hours to allow any staves to expand to stop any leaks present. After the club was happy with the retaining capability of the barrel the water was emptied. 

The steamer should be put in for 20 to 25 minutes. While the barrel is being steamed the kegs should be prepped to fill the barrel. Filling from Corny kegs should be a similar setup for any kegerator with CO₂ being injected in the “in” port and an open ended hose should be connected to the “out” port. Ensure that the “out” port hose is first in the barrel and touching the bottom or close to touching the bottom of the barrel before filling to avoid oxidizing the beer. For CO₂ pressure the club found success at around 12 PSI. We recommend that an extra member brew a batch or asking members in the club to brew more beer than the barrel can hold to account for any members who were not able to reach exactly 5 gallons (19 L). This ensures the barrel is completely filled and does not allow the top staves to dry out. The barrel is monitored and if the fill level drops too much then more of the original recipe can be brewed and added to top off the barrel. 

Racking from the Barrel

Again, racking from the barrel can be done by siphoning, but since we invested in a barrel bulldog here are the steps we use: First begin with sanitizing the bulldog. Remove the bung and drop the bulldog down to the bottom of the barrel. Tighten the bung stop to create an airlock and connect the bulldog to the CO₂. Similar to dispensing from Corny kegs, the CO₂ level should only be enough to allow the beer from the barrel to smoothly flow out into the waiting kegs. With either the siphon tube or bulldog the fill tube should be connected to a sanitized hose that is placed in the bottom of the Corny keg to be filled. One member removes the lid, empties any sanitizer from the keg, and sprays down the lid with sanitizer. Just like filling the barrel the hose should be at the bottom of the keg to avoid oxidation. Once the keg is filled the lid is replaced and CO₂ is injected in the “in” port to flush out any oxygen.

Once the kegs are filled members collect them to either carbonate or further age on fruit or adjuncts. 

While COVID has made some of the more recent racks and refills virtual, we look forward to the time when these events can get back in person. And even when we can’t all be involved in each step, the barrel program has kept homebrewing exciting and increased the communal feel within the club during these times.

MASH Club Recipes

I recently came across a used half barrel that the local pub was throwing out. It was almost ready to fall to pieces as two of the bands had fallen off and the top one was also ready to fall off. It would be very difficult to reassemble, so I carefully put the bands back on and took it home. I knew there was a good use for it, but I wasn’t sure what that was at the time.

I knew I wanted to use the barrel for some sort of furniture project, but I was not sure what to make with it until I saw the nice graphics on the top. I sanded the top back and put furniture oil on it to make the art stand out. It looked good when I finished so I decided to keep the graphic, which would mean keeping the top intact. My first thought was to convert the barrel into a coffee table, but as the project progressed, the missus said she liked the height of the table and would like it on the deck next to her chair.

I decided to make the table with three legs as they don’t rock around on uneven surfaces, which would be best for outdoor furniture. If you have all of your materials ready to go, it should take only a few hours to build from start to finish, especially if you have help — I convinced my kids to help me with the sanding and staining.

The basic premise of the project is to mark out the legs and cut them out with a reciprocating hand saw. Once you have the legs cut out, you can remove the bottom ring, reinforce the top ring and do some sanding and staining. Aside from the task of acquiring the actual barrel, you don’t need too many tools or supplies (see list below), especially if you already like to construct woodworking projects at home.

As is the case with any woodworking project, always be safe. Be sure to use eye protection when sawing, grinding, sanding and hammering, and also build your barrel table in a well-ventilated area or outside where you won’t inhale fumes from any wood treatments or finish.

I enjoy building my own projects, many of which you can check out on the Web at Instructables.com (find my posts at www.instructables.com/member/liquidhandwash.) In addition to my wine barrel table project I also made a fruit bowl with some of the left over barrel planks. After making the table, I spent a long time sitting and thinking on a pile of the oak barrel planks, which were curved and tapered, making them difficult to work with. So the fruit bowl idea was a great way to use some of that leftover wood. You can make your own fruit bowls with most of the same tools you use for this table project along with some wood glue and a few wood clamps. A coat of furniture oil makes the wine stain on the inside of the

timber darker, which gives the bowl an unusual look. (In addition to my other build-it projects on Instructables, you can also see some great photos of my kids helping me out with building the projects.)

Materials & Tools

• a used 60-gallon (225-L) wine barrel
• sand paper grits 40, 80, 120, 240  
• matte black paint (or your color of choice) 
• 3 or 4 coach bolts with washers and nuts
• drill and drill bits
• 3 or 4 wood screws   
• small nail or tacks  
• hammer  
• jig saw (reciprocating saw)  
• clean rags  
• your favorite timber finish  
• angle grinder, with sanding disc  

Steps

1. REMOVE BANDS

Start by removing the top two bands with a hammer and a block of wood and then clean them with thinners. I hung them from the roof with wire and spray painted them matte black, but you can spray them any color you like. I also painted the heads of the coach bolts.

Next, mark out the three slats that are going to be used for legs. Make sure the bands are straight and tight as well as drilled and screwed to the three slats to the bottom band so nothing will move in the next steps. The top band had quite a sharp edge on it, so I used a grinder with a sanding disc to remove the edge.

2. SANDING, OILING, DRILLING

Next you can give the barrel an initial sanding. I used four different grit sand papers starting with 40, then 80, 120 and 240. I only sanded the top and the top of the sides and the legs. You could probably do this step last, but I put a coat of my favorite furniture oil on so that it would be under the bands, helping protect the timber from spills and moisture. Just use a rag to rub the oil on. I only oiled the surfaces that were not going to be removed. Next drill three holes big enough for a jigsaw blade to pass through.

3. CUTTING THE LEGS

Next, cut around the bottom line the second band has left. I found the oak was very hard and difficult to cut with a dull blade, so be sure to have a new, sharp blade. (I should really have put a new blade in the saw, but the store was closed.) Don’t forget to leave the the legs uncut. The waste wood can then be removed and the second band can now be fitted. I knocked it down with a hammer and a block of wood and drilled three holes through the band and the legs into which the coach bolts were fitted.

4. SECURE THE TOP BAND

To help keep the top band in place, I drilled three small holes and nailed in some carpet tacks as they had an old style black head which matched the look of the table.

5. REMOVE THE BOTTOM HOOP

Now that the table has been bolted together, the bottom band can be removed and the legs sanded and finished off. The missus likes the height of the table so I left it at this height, but it could also be cut down for a coffee table or to whatever height you would prefer. The legs are then sanded before more oil is applied.

6. ENJOY YOUR TABLE

Finished! The table is sturdy (even though the curve of the staves may give the impression that it is not). This little table is great for serving drinks. You may reapply wood oil periodically if the wood looks dry after a few seasons.

There are many woods beyond oak that can add complexity to beer. Two pros who know their way around these exotic flavors share their top tips.

Wayne Wambles, Brewmaster at Cigar City Brewing in Tampa, Florida

We’ve used many exotic woods at Cigar City Brewing over the years. The first one we used back in the pilot days was Spanish cedar. We initially infused it into an early prototype for Marshal Zhukov’s Imperial Stout. We were pleasantly surprised by the resinous character that it provided to the already existing forward roasted barley expression. They seemed to pair well. As we continued to experiment with it, we began trialing it in IPAs. This allowed us to understand the true nature of the wood because the wood was no longer competing with the assertive roasted grain character. We noticed that it displayed a forward white grapefruit character, along with white pepper and sandalwood. This ending up being a better idea in the end and led to the development of Humidor IPA, which is called Spanish Cedar Jai Alai today. The wood is not cedar but a form of mahogany. If too much is infused into the beer, it will take on a harsh resinous character. Experience helps to guide the usage rate to achieve the desired expression. 

We also trialed Cypress because it is an indigenous, abundant, local wood in Florida. By this time, I began to realize that testing in lighter colored beers with more malt expression and less hop expression provided a better understanding of how the wood was impacting the beer. Cypress can have a yellow cake expression and does exhibit some vanilla notes as well. For this reason, we decided to use the wood in a base beer that was like helles lager and infused with strawberries to create a strawberry shortcake concept. We also used this wood successfully in an imperial milk stout. 

African Padauk wood was an interesting one. It’s a beautiful wood, visually. It seemed a shame to destroy it to make beer but I found that it had some unique components, so I decided to try it. The wood displays delicate chocolate and cinnamon notes but can become very tannic, if left in contact with the beer too long. I infused it into a unique brown ale that I would refer to as a modern brown ale, in which I reduced some of the roasted grains to allow the wood to shine through.

Tamamuri was a unique wood that I discovered while working with Darwin Brewing. We brought in seven different woods from the Amazon and tested them all in neutral lager beers. We allowed them two weeks of static contact in crowlers. There were two that stood out in the end, Cocobolo and Tamamuri. We decided Tamamuri was more inspiring and brewed a Maibock with aji amarillo peppers and infused it with Tamamuri. Tamamuri has a pear to pear brandy expression and is not easy to describe. It has a pomme feel. The concept was designed to incorporate elements that would be found in Peruvian culture. 

One of my favorite non-oak alternatives has been Amburana. It’s a wood that is native to South America and it is used for the construction of Cachaca barrels. It has a distinct gingerbread spice aroma/flavor with lofty vanilla. I’ve used this in several beers, all of them bigger, maltier beers, with great results. Imperial brown ale, imperial stout, and Baltic porter are examples of what has worked well in the past, but this wood could work very well in lower ABV, maltier beers too, like English brown ale. It’s a very forward wood and can easily dominate the flavor profile if not infused carefully.

I’ll leave the pairing of woods with adjuncts up to the imagination. They can create added depth, but I prefer to spotlight the uniqueness of the wood versus overshadowing it.

Aging the wood outside will allow some of the green character to dissipate. Toasting is another good measure to take prior to use. We usually have them processed into spirals and then toasted. If this is being attempted at home with local wood, results may vary.

Toasting the wood in an oven at a low setting could very well help to remove any beer spoiling organisms that might be present in the wood but is not guaranteed. It is simply a precaution. Holding at 175 °F (79 °C) for 30 minutes would likely eradicate many bacteria and offer a slight degree of caramelization of the wood sugars.

I would suggest using smaller growlers and making sure they are purged well to avoid any oxidation that might result in paper to cardboard character that might be confused with tannins from the wood sample.

Fill the growler with a neutral or less assertive beer, like Munich helles or American blonde ale. This will allow them to assess the impact of the wood more readily without interjecting esters, hops, or roasted malts.

Allow at least 14 days of static contact time and store in the refrigerator to reduce staling of the beer.

Following the contact time, simply decant into a glass that allows for proper, focused delivery of aromatics to the nose and drink the sample. Decide whether it’s something that could positively contribute to the beer. Smelling and tasting beers or new raw materials usually gives me ideas about how to use them with other raw materials or base styles of beer. If it’s not inspiring or you don’t see a use, move on until you find one that is promising.

Negative samples usually express high levels of phenols. Clove is usually one of the more dominant ones. These samples could still be trialed, and they may work well in a Belgian-style beer, for instance, but I’ve never been successful with samples that displayed high, single note, phenol levels. Amburana is one of the exceptions but keep in mind that it’s not single note.

Negative samples could also display smokey notes (phenols again), which might not express as smokey in the finished beer but in other ways that might express more like autolytic, meat-like aromas and flavors. I avoid smoke phenols in exotic wood samples. If I want smoke, there are many other proven ways to infuse it into beer. 

I also consider neutral samples to be negative samples. Neutral samples either have nothing to offer or they are so subtle that you might not ever get them to express in even a delicate beer. These samples will also tend to be tannic and papery.

Positive samples can have a massive array of possibilities that can express as fruit, phenols (baking spices . . . not one note clove/smokey/medicinal . . . vanilla is a singular positive example and it is common in oak), woodiness, and tannins to name a few. If you feel that it is pleasing, give it a shot.

Keep in mind that not all specific types of wood have the same quality. You may be able to obtain a sample of Spanish cedar, for instance, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be of a high enough quality to use in the brewing process. Spanish cedar is a good wood to use as an example. If it is lower quality, it can smell like hamster bedding and pencil shavings, devoid of the white grapefruit and white pepper. Finding the right quality for this variety is very important. It must pass the aromatic test prior to using it in beer and even better to take it a step farther and test in a sample beer in growlers or crowlers to ensure quality before implementing it into a larger batch of beer.

Sensory of any exotic wood prior to larger scale use is imperative, even if you have used it before. If it’s not from the same lot from the same proven source, you should always test prior to using it in any scaled-up versions of beer. 

Be curious and exploratory but be careful. Do research before taking something from the forest and using it in beer. Some woods can contain toxins. Better to be safe than sorry. Aside from necessary caution, there are a large amount of unexplored possibilities out there that are waiting to be discovered. These could add to the uniqueness of beer complexity and cultural reflections in the future.

Jamey Adams, Brewmasater/Founder at Arches Brewing in Hapeville, Georgia

Southern Bel’ is a Belgian ale with Peruvian Palo Santo wood. Palo Santo is a protected wild tree that grows from Southern Mexico down to Peru. It has been used for centuries for its mystical properties when burned as incense or by extracting the essential oils. It comes bundled as short, thin pieces of wood called smudging sticks. Due to its protected nature, only the fallen limbs can be harvested. We add these smudging sticks to finished beer and the alcohol acts as a solvent. The flavor profile that gets extracted by the alcohol in the beer is identical to the distinct smell of the essential oils. Since most people have never tasted this wood, their brains work overtime trying to place the flavors into categories that they have experienced before. The most common flavors associated with Southern Bel’ are coconut, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  

In Arches’ early days, we were trying to round out our portfolio with a beer that we could honestly say “You’ve never had a beer like this before.” We took our Belgian blonde (hence the Bel’ in Southern Bel’) and all got to pick a wood species that we had never tried before. I, being from Texas, chose mesquite, which turned the blonde into a redhead overnight. Our head brewer at the time, Greg Mickle, chose a wood species that, frankly, I had never heard of — Palo Santo (Holy Wood).

The recipe works so well because the slight phenolic character of the esters in our Belgian blonde really complement the flavor of the essential oils in the Palo Santo to create the truly unique Southern Bel’. The blonde recipe also uses a number of specialty grains including biscuit, aromatic, special B, and honey malts.  

When experimenting with different woods, it’s always best to try it with a more neutral flavor. We are lucky in that sense as we make a really light lager that when paired with different woods allows us to differentiate the flavors that are coming from each wood species and also helps to determine dosing rates and contact times. All of these factors need to be accounted for when adding wood to beer.  

I think it’s important to experiment with different ways to get the flavor of the wood into the beer, but keep in mind that these woods do not come sanitized and there are a number of living creatures that call the wood their home. 

A last bit of advice for homebrewers: Amazon is great, but I recommend contacting a local woodworking group to see if they have any scraps to try in your next project. Collaboration builds community!

For those of you who have caught the oak-barrel love (or just about any barrel type for that matter), you know that once in . . . you’re hooked.

There really is nothing that compares to inviting a small group of friends over and pulling samples from the barrel for a tasting. Does it need more time? Should I chop up a vanilla bean and toss it in? Are the Bourbon flavors melding? The complexities found from wood-aging beer, thanks especially from the microoxidation that occurs through the staves, can be a thing of beauty when handled with finesse.

I love brewing darker beers like browns, porters, and stouts for aging in more freshly purchased Bourbon barrels. I keep two 10-gallon (38-L) barrels in my house, one for the funk-da-fied beers (the older barrel) and one for clean beers (the newer barrel).

This means I’ve been hoisting roughly 125–130 lbs. (57–59 kg) from awkward positions many times a year. That needed to change.

But the reality of my house is that it doesn’t have unlimited space and enough of it is already taken up by my bar and draft system, grain storage, and brewing equipment (not to mention maybe 1⁄3 of my garage). This means I don’t have a dedicated place for my barrels, so I have to shuffle barrels around my basement to get to things located behind the barrels fairly regularly. Also, I keep the barrels in separate locations in my basement to prevent cross-contamination from wild organisms in the funky barrel. This means one barrel needs to be moved through two rooms when it is filled or when needing to be racked. Long story short . . . moving my barrels is a fairly regular occurrence. Add in the fact that I don’t have a peristaltic pump for racking, which means I need to lift my barrels up on top of a stable chair to get gravity to work for me, and it just seemed like I was asking to throw my back out. After years of muscling my full barrels through this system, I knew I had to come up with a better solution.

Doing some quick math, 10 gallons (38 L) of water clocks in at 83.4 lbs. (38 kg). If it’s an imperial stout with a terminal gravity that clocks in at 1.034, that’s an additional 2.8 lbs. (1.3 kg) of sugar at that volume of beer. I don’t have my exact weight of my empty barrels, but that size barrel typically runs in the 40–45 lb. (18–20 kg) range according to an online search. This means I’ve been hoisting roughly 125–130 lbs. (57–59 kg) from awkward positions many times a year. That needed to change.

So my solution was a two part design: A mobile cradle for each barrel that rides on caster wheels and a hoist system for lifting the barrels for racking. While my hoist system is just one way to skin this cat, any secure hoist system would work. I almost splurged on an electric lift, but figured that might be more headache than it was worth. A basic power puller (or come-along) ratchet hung from the ceiling provided the perfect hoist and can be removed and used for a plethora of other tasks around the house and yard.

The cradles have been very handy. I can easily pull my barrels out of their nook for racking, topping off, or like last night, when my wife needed me to pull the winter clothes from the far back corner of the laundry room. If you are dealing with moving barrels, I highly recommend this project.

Tools and Materials

• (1) 2-in. x 6-in. x 8-ft.
• spruce board
• (4) 90-lb. (40-kg) caster wheels
• Hoist system (I used a Maasdam 1-ton Pow’r puller)
• Large diameter screw eye
• Chop saw
• Tape measure
• Wood screws

Step by Step

1. Barrel measurements

I solely work with 10-gallon (38-L) barrels, so if you want to design your own, you may need to adjust the board length and reinforcements in order to fit and support your barrel size and weight, bigger or smaller. I cut the beams to the length of the barrel, then the supports to 2 in. (5 cm) longer on each side than the barrel’s maximum girth.

2. Create the base

I placed the beams on the bottom and the supports on top and secured them together with several 2.5-in. (6.4 cm) wood screws. I then secured the caster wheels on the bottom. I used two free-rolling casters and two locking casters; this allows me to secure the cradle in place when I don’t want them to move.

3. Cut the wedge pieces

With the remaining 2×6, I first cut it in half, then gave each half a 45° mitre cut creating 4 wedges. With the help of my wife, I centered the barrel on the base and I eyeballed where to cut each of the wedges. I decided to chop the boards down to 2×4 size, so if you have some 2×4 board handy, you may consider using this size instead for the wedges. I used two 3-in. (7.6 cm) screws to secure each wedge to the base. I performed steps 2 and 3 twice, one cradle for each barrel.

4. Secure Your Anchor

Next up was to create my hoist. While I was almost tempted to purchase an electric hoist, the reality was that a come-along ratchet device would be much more handy around the house. So I pre-drilled a hole into a secure joist in the basement ceiling and placed a large-diameter eye screw in the hole. The come-along ratchet can then be returned to my garage when not in use.

5. Create Your Hoist Cradle

This step is one that I will be improving in the future with a better hoist cradle for the barrels, but for now simply winding the strap from the ratchet three times around the barrel to create a sling-like seat for the barrel has done the trick. But something like a wide-lifting nylon sling would probably
be preferential.

6. Test

This one is a rather easy step but one that I perform with each barrel lift to make sure that the lift cradle is properly secure. With the two caster wheels locked, I lift the barrel just about an inch (2.5 cm) off the base and let it hang for a minute. Once I feel comfortable that the barrel is properly secured, I can then complete the lift up to the chair where I rack the beer into kegs.