Lambic in an old wine barrel?

I have the opportunity to obtain a 60 gal wine barrel that was used to age cabernet sauvignon. It will be emptied right before I can pick it up. I've never made a lambic before, but my goal is to use this barrel to age some lambic, take out 5 gal or so at a time and replenish it when I do. So it will always have lambic in there.

I plan to soak it in warm water to remove the stronger cabernet flavors, but I think having such flavors in there should be OK. I plan to make a 5gal batch in a bucket and ferment entirely with White Labs WLP655 (Belgian Sour Mix). Once fermented, I will rack into the barrel. Shortly after, I plan to brew 50 gal of lambic and collect directly into the barrel. So the 5gal batch is essentially a large starter. I have several questions:

(1) Will pitching WLP655 right from the start be OK or should I use something more neutral?

(2) Is soaking the barrel in warm water for a bit enough to rid the barrel of most of the cabernet flavors? If not, what would you suggest?

(3) How might I go about sanitizing the barrel? I've heard of hanging and burning sulphur strips.

(4) Any other tips?

Thanks!

Well, I've been looking on HBT for years, I guess its time I finally start posting. I'll start with yours.

(1) Will pitching WLP655 right from the start be OK or should I use something more neutral?
Go straight in with a WLP655 starter.

(2) Is soaking the barrel in warm water for a bit enough to rid the barrel of most of the cabernet flavors? If not, what would you suggest?
Personally, I'd hold on to as many wine flavors as possible. If you've gotten yourself a wine barrel, take advantage of the flavors it has! I recently filled two Riesling barrels that were in use for 10 years - and the flavors that come through are subtle but complex. However, doing many washes can eliminate some flavors - depends on how old the barrels are.

(3) How might I go about sanitizing the barrel? I've heard of hanging and burning sulphur strips.
As mentioned earlier, pitch it all right in. Hopefully you want those flavors, otherwise you could just use toasted oak cubes. When Allagash first started doing Curieux, they started with washing the barrels. After looking at the marvelous carmel colored water going down the drain, they realized that was their flavor leaving too.

(4) Any other tips?
Get a stopper and a blowoff tube. If you fill that sucker up, there is going to be a lot of junk coming out the top of the barrel. At least, that's what happened with mine.
Don't do anything to it unless it smells like crud. Use the wine flavors to help the complexity of your beer.
Brew as much of it as you can in one day.

I also think it would be a shame to let the wine flavors go to waste. It might be a little overpowering at first but it will fade with time and as you replenish the beer. It will give you a nice evolving flavor.

An alternative thought to the lambic is to brew an oud bruin or flanders red in that barrel. The cab flavors might pair better with that style although it depends upon what you want to drink.

Fill the whole thing at once. 55 gallons of headspace will almost certainly give it too much oxygen and you'll have an acetobacter runaway.

Bobby_M said:

Fill the whole thing at once. 55 gallons of headspace will almost certainly give it too much oxygen and you'll have an acetobacter runaway.

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i agree - you can whip up the 5 gal "starter" first and let it sit in a 5 gal carboy until the rest of the wort is ready. then rack the wort into hte barrel and top off with your 5 gal starter.

Bobby_M said:

Fill the whole thing at once. 55 gallons of headspace will almost certainly give it too much oxygen and you'll have an acetobacter runaway.

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I believe his plan is to brew 5 gallons, ferment it in a carboy. Then pick up the barrel and brew an additional 55 gallons and dump the lambic in the carboy into the barrel as a "starter".

(3) How might I go about sanitizing the barrel? I've heard of hanging and burning sulphur strips.
If you are getting the barrel that soon after dumping, there really isn't any need to sanitize it.

I guess I assumed more time for the shortly after part:

Once fermented, I will rack into the barrel. Shortly after, I plan to brew 50 gal of lambic and collect directly into the barrel.

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The only issue with making a starter with a lambic blend is that you grow the Saccharomyces out of proportion with all the other bugs. For that reason, it's better to start with several packs even if you do grow it a bit.

So if I get the barrel within hours after it is emptied, then sanitation is not an issue? That sounds OK to me...less work. The only issue is brewing 55 gal will take several days for me. Would sanitation be a problem if it sits, albeit sealed, for a week or two before I fill it? In any event, I plan to do 20 gal one day, 20 gal the next, and 10 gal the last day. Added to the 5 gal starter it makes 55 gal for a 60 gal barrel. So I should have some headspace for krausen. Or would it be best to fill the sucker up with very little headspace. I plan to have a blowoff either way.

I plan to brew a 5 gal batch with WLP655 and let it completely ferment. And as someone mentioned, I did plan to brew the remaining 50 gal and "pitch" the entire 5 gal batch (yeast cake and all) when collecting. But I understand the idea of also pitching a few more vials of WLP655 because of the increased saccharomyces concentration after fermentation. Question is, how many extra vials for 50 gal of wort?

If you get the barrel hours after its emptied, letting it sit sealed for a week or two before filling it absolutely no problem.

If I were you, I'd fill the barrel with 50 gallons, and then have 10 gallons fermenting outside of the barrel. Once the violent part of primary has finished, then top off the barrel and bung it. Get a dual fermentation bung.

While saccro and lacto will be increased if you only pitch the 5 gal, this isn't to say pedio and brett is lost. In the long run, I would imagine you'd be fine, but you may want to pitch more WLP655, or even just brett and pedio? For all 15 barrels of lambic I've done, I pitched 1L of yeast per barrel. I'm not sure how this would translate to those little vials.

you could get some no-chill containers and brew 5-10 gal at a time at your convenience - then dump it all in there at once?

Sanitizing wouldn't be your biggest problem .. how about being sure that the barrel is waterproof (before finding out when transfering your wort into it)?
If it's within hours of emptying it should be fine, but I don't know if it stays waterproof for a days/weeks.

Also, a Lambic is normally fermented/lagered in brand new unused barrels. When putting wort in used (wine)barrels you should be thinking of a flamish red. I have a 14 gallon barrel filled up with a flamish red beer.
First I fermented the beer (2 batches) with a clean dry yeast. After that I tranfered the beer to the barrel with a smackpack Wyeast Roeselare.
My barrel was completely dry so I soaked it in water for 3 days.

Koffie said:

Also, a Lambic is normally fermented/lagered in brand new unused barrels. When putting wort in used (wine)barrels you should be thinking of a flamish red.

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You got that backwards. Flemish red's can use new barrels as they want more oak tannins. Lambic however does not. Lambics use used barrels as the previous use of the barrel (wine) has extracted almost all of the oak tannins from the barrel. Thats actually why wineries sell the barrel, because they can no longer extract tannins from it and therefor have no use for it.

For lambic you are looking for as neutral of a barrel as you can find. Drie Fonteinen prefers used Pilsner Urquell barrels.

Lambic is put in used barrels, but not used for wine
Ever seen a (non kriek) lambic with a red color?

I know Cantillon and Tilquin use wine barrels, and I assume most every other lambic brewer uses wine barrels. Its only Drie Fonteinen that I've heard uses the Pilsner Urquell barrels. Upon getting the barrel from the winery, the barrel is rinsed out until it no longer flows with color. For Cantillon's Lou Pepe series, those are all first uses of wine barrels. In the first use of a wine barrel you may pick up a very slight wine flavor, but subsequent uses you will not. If you rinse out the barrel, you would never pick up any color from it.

OK, it seems you are better informed than me. Perhaps I was wrong.

One year ago, we brewed a Belgian lambic (almost 55 gal worth) and dumped it into that French oak wine barrel (that had Cabernet Sauvignon) mentioned in the OP. Today, we brew more! We'll remove some from the barrel to age separately on raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. What we brew today will go back into the barrel for another year! And about 5 months from now, we should have some tasty raspberry lambic, blackberry lambic, and blueberry lambic! I've been sampling from the barrel a few times in the past year, and the beer has aged and soured nicely!

jgourd said:

One year ago, we brewed a Belgian lambic (almost 55 gal worth) and dumped it into that French oak wine barrel (that had Cabernet Sauvignon) mentioned in the OP. Today, we brew more! We'll remove some from the barrel to age separately on raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. What we brew today will go back into the barrel for another year! And about 5 months from now, we should have some tasty raspberry lambic, blackberry lambic, and blueberry lambic! I've been sampling from the barrel a few times in the past year, and the beer has aged and soured nicely!

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Awesome to see! I got myself a used french oak barrel I filled with a flanders red style beer in February. It's been getting better and better! can't wait to see how it is in another few months!

levifunk said:

I know Cantillon and Tilquin use wine barrels, and I assume most every other lambic brewer uses wine barrels. Its only Drie Fonteinen that I've heard uses the Pilsner Urquell barrels. Upon getting the barrel from the winery, the barrel is rinsed out until it no longer flows with color. For Cantillon's Lou Pepe series, those are all first uses of wine barrels. In the first use of a wine barrel you may pick up a very slight wine flavor, but subsequent uses you will not. If you rinse out the barrel, you would never pick up any color from it.

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Armand uses wine barrels also, all the barrels at the brewery (small amount) are wine barrels. Now the barrels in his other barrel stores are bigger and the pils barrels. I remember reading either Oud Beersel or De Cam (or both) use pils barrels also.

The big benifit to pils barrels are they are huge. I think they are around 240 gallons. Pils sold off most of their barrels in 1992(?) (probably dirt cheap) to go stainless. Pils pitched their barrels but after seeing the existing ones at the brewery i bet there is little to none wood flavor left in them.

BSing with Armand and his Brewers they don't care what type of barrel they use. When they get new wine barrels they rinse them till the water comes out clear, steam the inside then fill with wort.

After seeing a few lambic breweries I highly doubt they have a huge influx of new barrels. Armand told me he uses his barrels untill they produce vinegar or don't hold wort anymore, I bet that's the case at all lambic breweries. The couple of new barrels they get a year is such a minority you won't pick up the wine when they are all blended together.

My home brew club procured a Red wine Barrel last year and did a Flanders red in it. We just harvested the beer rinsed the barrel out and now are aging a lambic in it. I'll let you all know how much wine flavor we pull off the second go in 12 months.

Yeah, De Cam uses Urquell barrels as well (exclusively I believe). They are 1000L but they had them re-coopered down to that size. The book Lambicland says that the Urquell barrels are pitch lined, which would make sense for long term storage of a clean beer in oak with decades of reuse.

But back to the wine barrels, as others have said they are the standard for lambic producers.

jgourd said:

One year ago, we brewed a Belgian lambic (almost 55 gal worth) and dumped it into that French oak wine barrel (that had Cabernet Sauvignon) mentioned in the OP. Today, we brew more! We'll remove some from the barrel to age separately on raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. What we brew today will go back into the barrel for another year! And about 5 months from now, we should have some tasty raspberry lambic, blackberry lambic, and blueberry lambic! I've been sampling from the barrel a few times in the past year, and the beer has aged and soured nicely!

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So I collected on top of fruit. To test, I put a small amount of lambic in a glass with a small amount of raspberry puree. I let it sit for a few hours. The mix was perfect. It is everything I want a raspberry lambic to be. I can only imagine what the 10 gal I collected on raspberry puree will taste like in a few months!

jgourd said:

I can only imagine what the 10 gal I collected on raspberry puree will taste like in a few months!

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Probably pretty amazing. Fresh fruit lambics are the ****!