Inoculating a barrel

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cinderbike

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This goes out to oldsock and the other gurus:

Any special steps to inoculating a barrel with bugs/brett? Or would just racking a sour into it get the process going?

I'm looking into starting up a handful of barrels that I can 'infect' wort with.
 
a horny barrel? yes just ferment a beer in a barrel and you will be able to reuse it for subsequent beers. of course over time the population of bugs may change in some way so that has to be considered for the long run.
 
Assume you mean a big (50gal) barrel. What Im doing is primary fermenting my base beer with neutral yeast except for 5gal (10%) which I am fermenting with my bug yeast. All goes into barrel for year long secondary. The barrel then should be good and innoculated for subsequent batches
 
Yep. Nothing special. Either add 5-10% young sour beer that you're happy with the direction of, or pitch microbes of your choice into the beer. They'll find their way into the wood, no problem.
 
Yep. Nothing special. Either add 5-10% young sour beer that you're happy with the direction of, or pitch microbes of your choice into the beer. They'll find their way into the wood, no problem.

That's what I thought, I've got a used wine barrel and 2 5 gallon Balcones barrels that are aging clean beers now, but will soon be moved over to sourville.
 
I did the old socks method and had some young roselare that I supplemented with a lot of freshly fermented WLP550 beer and a couple 1 year old roselare carboys. I've noticed it go in different directions over the past couple of year. Last summer it was very lemony and now it is going through a horsey trend.
 
So, is there agreement as to whether inoculating is even necessary?

A friend is giving me a freshly-emptied wine barrel in a few weeks.
I'm planning to fill it completely with a wit beer for a long secondary fermentation.
Seems to me like washing it out or scraping it would defeat the purpose of using the wine barrel, but maybe I'm being naive.

I'm thinking something in the family of DFH Red and White, but not a clone.
(I don't mind if it's a little funky.)
 
So, is there agreement as to whether inoculating is even necessary?

A friend is giving me a freshly-emptied wine barrel in a few weeks.
I'm planning to fill it completely with a wit beer for a long secondary fermentation.
Seems to me like washing it out or scraping it would defeat the purpose of using the wine barrel, but maybe I'm being naive.

I'm thinking something in the family of DFH Red and White, but not a clone.
(I don't mind if it's a little funky.)

if you want a sour wit then you have to use sour bugs. if that beer ferments in the barrel the barrel will be inoculated with the bugs and will sour any other beer you put into it.
 
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