55 Gallon Bourbon Barrel Barleywine advice

Some friends in my homebrew club acquired a second use 55 gallon bourbon barrel and our little collective of 5-6 guys have decided it'll bulk age an English Barleywine. We'll brew 6 x 10 gallon batches in a day, ferment out in carboys and transfer into barrel for bulk aging after krausen dies down.

Looking for any practical advice from anyone that has done this volume of a high gravity beer in a barrel.

I've never done this, but I am very interested to see what advice you receive.

Buddy and I did the same thing. We have freshly dumped bourbon barrel in my basement full of a 1.101 stout. We brewed, fermented and transferred in to the barrel.

A few days before 'barrel fill day' we filled the barrel with water and let it sit for two days and drained. Reason we did this as the barrel was going to live in my basement I wanted to make SURE it was fully swelled and liquid tight, it was but am still glad we did this. You would not believe the amount of wood char/chunks that came out. The next day the barrel still smelt overwhelmingly of bourbon. We carried it down to my basement, set it on it's stand and gravity filled from fermentation buckets till full. There is a 1/2 full fermenter next to the barrel for top off beer (angels share). Barrel has been filled for almost 3wks. Took a sample a couple of days ago and was amazed that there is already bourbon flavor there but no 'barrel flavor'. We plan to thief another sample in the next week or two.

Have not had a drop hit the floor or even any apparent seepage. Also, we plan to drain, rinse with a fill of water and refill in the same day. We are already brewing a Scottish Wee Heavy for the next filling. This is has been a really cool experiment so far.
Good luck!

I've done it a few times. Like lakedawgs said, definitely make sure it swells & is liquid tight unless its a fresh dump. Depending on what was in it before, may want to give it a rinse beforehand anyway. As a second use, you'll probably need at least 6 months in the barrel. May want to keep some extra on hand for topping it off as well

Thanks guys, good info. Did you pitch any fresh yeast in barrel b/c of the higher gravity? Any wisdom on a racking schedule? I was thinking 3-5 weeks from pitching depending on how cool ambient gets in the basement.

We are planning to brew 60 gallons and keep 5 gallons for topping off. We'll likely let it age for 6 months to a year depending on how much flavor it imparts. Hopefully after that I can convince them to go funky, then sour.

I haven't had a need to pitch fresh yeast in the barrel, maybe if you were going to bottle it you may. Racking has been from 1-6 weeks after pitching, so your plan is solid. a little activity in the barrel isn't a bad thing, but generally you'd want most of the fermentation completed first to limit trub and improve your yield.

shouldn't be too hard to convince them on the funky/sour path, after 3 uses shouldnt be much character left for much else.

I have my second batch in the barrel now, both imperial stouts. First batch took forever, 4 months or so, to get even a little carbonation in the bottle. When we go to bottle this second batch we are going to add wine yeast to the barrel about 30 minutes prior to racking to bottling buckets and priming sugar.

I suggest adding a bottle of bourbon to the barrel for a week or two and rolling it around every so often. The booze will make sure it is disinfected in the barrel and that nothing is growing in there. It will also prevent it from drying out. It will also add to the bourbon flavors lost during the first use

Cheers!.

Thanks again for the advice guys. Getting pretty excited for the brewday coming up this weekend, but lots of logistics to deal with. And some of the details just seem laughable...like the 4.5 Trillion cells of yeast we need to pitch

For anyone interested, reporting back on the big barleywine brewday. The 13 hour brewday! There were moments when we were a well-oiled machine and moments of herding cats. We managed to brew 60 gallons of a high gravity beer in one day and hopefully it turns out well!

Our output is happily fermenting away



Some simple lessons learned (in my mind, at least):

• print out multiple checklists for everyone w/ recipe & scaled batch breakdowns for each MLT and BK with individual mash/sparge volumes
• agree on a single mash process (we didn't) for both consistency of process and actual brewhouse efficiency
• have as much equipment either setup the day before or mock up what goes where
• pre-mill grain & weigh out each MLT's grist into buckets ahead of time
• propane, have way more propane than you think you'll need, you'll end up needing it
• gentlemen's agreement that no participant stays out late and shows up hungover

Our bourbon barrel, ready to be filled

Looks great! It's a process for sure. I brewed 24 gallons over 2 weekends for me and a buddies share and another guy brewed 35 gallons over 2 weekends for his and a buddies share.

Something we did about 3 days before 'barrel fill day' was to have all the beer delivered to my garage, first week of February. Gave the beer time to cold crash in my cold garage. From tasting the barrel the next beer likely won't be going in for 4-6 more weeks, don't know how we are going to cold crash that one.

lakedawgs said:

Looks great! It's a process for sure. I brewed 24 gallons over 2 weekends for me and a buddies share and another guy brewed 35 gallons over 2 weekends for his and a buddies share.

Something we did about 3 days before 'barrel fill day' was to have all the beer delivered to my garage, first week of February. Gave the beer time to cold crash in my cold garage. From tasting the barrel the next beer likely won't be going in for 4-6 more weeks, don't know how we are going to cold crash that one.

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Thanks! We talked about doing the same thing, but decided to brew on premises at the barrel owner's house so that everything would ferment at the same basement temp, etc.

That looks awesome! Wish I had more brew buddies close by that we could do the same thing. Keep us updated

dcHokie said:

Thanks again for the advice guys. Getting pretty excited for the brewday coming up this weekend, but lots of logistics to deal with. And some of the details just seem laughable...like the 4.5 Trillion cells of yeast we need to pitch

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I hear ya. here is the yeast slurry (wyeast 1056, roughly 4 gallons from the local microbrewer) that we used for our 55 gallons of 1.120 OG barley wine. go big or go home!

Wow thats a lot of yeast! How many billions ya think? What kind is it?

tdogg said:

I hear ya. here is the yeast slurry (wyeast 1056, roughly 4 gallons from the local microbrewer) that we used for our 55 gallons of 1.120 OG barley wine. go big or go home!

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Wow, talk about going big, 4 gallons of pure slurry is a ton! That works out to something like 2.75 trillion cells per 5 gallons of wort...did you guys pitch it all?

jglazer said:

Wow thats a lot of yeast! How many billions ya think?

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Depending on viability, and my fuzzy math, 4 gallons of brewery-fresh slurry should be around 30 trillion cells

Yeah I don't remeber the exact math, but the slurry was fresh from a batch of 7% ipa, and we used about 20 oz of slurry per 5 gallon batch. Seems like a lot but it fermented clean.

tdogg said:

Yeah I don't remeber the exact math, but the slurry was fresh from a batch of 7% ipa, and we used about 20 oz of slurry per 5 gallon batch. Seems like a lot but it fermented clean.

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What type of barrel did you use for your barleywine, and how long are you guys planning to barrel-age?

The barrel was originally filled with Templeton Rye whiskey, . It will have spent about 6 months in the barrel by the time we get it out. We didnt originally plan on it being that long, but we have tasted it periodically and it's not too oaky.

Actually, we are planning an imperial stout brew to go into the barrel when we empty it. We may add some oak spirals next time.

tdogg said:

The barrel was originally filled with Templeton Rye whiskey, . It will have spent about 6 months in the barrel by the time we get it out. We didnt originally plan on it being that long, but we have tasted it periodically and it's not too oaky.

Actually, we are planning an imperial stout brew to go into the barrel when we empty it. We may add some oak spirals next time.

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We were planning another big beer for our second fill as well, but my brew partners just pulled a 5 month sample and our barrel picked up something sour/funky along the way. Apparently in a very pleasant, aged stock ale sort of way....I'm not at all disappointed We are targeting late fall/early winter to empty it and rack in a low ABV sour.

Are you sure it's a infection or just a sourness from the alcohol that was in the barrel?

We all pitched in on a march pump to empty our club barrel project. Move 55 gallons into 11 kegs in a jiffy.

Hopper5000 said:

Are you sure it's a infection or just a sourness from the alcohol that was in the barrel?

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Not sure really, though everyone seems to think infection from one of the 12 primary vessels as a likely culprit. When it was first picked up it had been purged w/ CO2 and plugged and smelled strongly of whiskey without even a hint a hit of anything funky, sour, acetic, etc. My friends gave it a few vigorous rinse/soak cycles with boiling water (15-20 gallons each time) and then hit it with some diammonium bisulfite. We filled it shortly after.

I see, when I have done these projects in the past as long as the barrel was dumped within about 4ish months and as it was well bunged we just racked the beer right into it without doing anything. The 40%+ alcohol environment in there is enough to kill anything that could live. Now we did dump out anything that might have been in there as far as liquid. We would also sometimes splash it with a bit of whatever spirit was in there before.

How often were you topping off. That can sometimes be a culprit when there is a lot of head space in there which would allow aceto bacteria to grow.

Hopper5000 said:

I see, when I have done these projects in the past as long as the barrel was dumped within about 4ish months and as it was well bunged we just racked the beer right into it without doing anything. The 40%+ alcohol environment in there is enough to kill anything that could live. Now we did dump out anything that might have been in there as far as liquid. We would also sometimes splash it with a bit of whatever spirit was in there before.

How often were you topping off. That can sometimes be a culprit when there is a lot of head space in there which would allow aceto bacteria to grow.

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I believe we did actually dump in a couple liters of bourbon prior to the fill, as well. Sloshed it around to give the barrel a nice 'refresh'. We thought we were fairly diligent about keeping it topped off, I think we added 1-2 gallons twice in 5 months.

Did everyone brew their own recipe when you did this, or was it all the same recipe?

Clef051 said:

Did everyone brew their own recipe when you did this, or was it all the same recipe?

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It was one recipe, brewed together in one long brewday. 2 sessions of 30 gallons each, using all of our equipment cobbled together.

Recipe
220 lbs 2-Row
7 lbs Crystal 120
7 lbs Cara 60

2 lbs EKG first wort hops

1 gallon US-04 (pure slurry from a brewery)