New HUGE Bourbon Cask! Pictures. Help...

Hey All-

I went on a bourbon distillery tour at Buffalo Trace in KY and left with a 53 gallon cask. Kind of an impulse buy but I'm still jacked about it.

I'm working on some sort of bourbon porter recipe for it (suggestions are welcome!).

My main concern now is prepping it. I spoke to someone who recommended I fill it with water for a few days to rehydrate the wood, then pre use I sanitize with boiling water, and soak it with a bottle or two of bourbon for a few days (to add some fresh flavor).

Also concerned about how I would fill it with that much boiling water.

Thoughts on this process? Suggestions?

Cheers,
Saul




Isn't Oaky pretty?

saul, i have absolutely no experience in this realm, but I might suggest you pour a bottle of whiskey or something in there and slosh it around to help the hydration issue.

as for sanitation: are you planning to fully ferment in the barrel or age in there? either way, i would think the booze would keep most of it at bay, and it might be interesting to see what micros are already in there and how they influence the beer.

nice score! now get to brewing up a huge batch(es) of beer!

SOUR BEER! Get some friends and do a Flanders Red or Lambic! You won't regret it,

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2008/10/plan-wine-barrel-flanders-red.html

Any idea how long its been sitting without liquid in it? My club got a barrel from allagash that had recently been used and it required no sanitization or hydration. It was in my possession for 2 weeks with no fluid. It leaked in a couple spots for less than 12 hours, negligible losses.

Between brews we fill with water treated with campden tablets to keep the barrel hydrated and bugs under control. Our first beer turned out pretty good, no unintentional souring.

Absolutely fill it with water and let it hydrate for a few days. Then Fill it with hot water (boiling ideally) to allow it to pasteurize. You just need steam or water over 180 degrees for ten minutes to kill anything. When you empty it, make sure to store it full or be sure to rehydrate before filling. This is key to check for leaks but also those whiskey barrels fail after time. Filling it with water prevents any wasted wort! And I have had great results with buffalo trace barrels. Great flavor. Lots of vanilla and oak

Fantastic impulse purchase!

That is awesome! Get a few friends to brew up some 'Kate The Great' to age in that baby!

from the looks of it, it won't work. you better send it to me for proper disposal.

I have had mine a while just keep it wet and you are good

The small barrels are three gal from a brewery distillery in Saint Louis Mo

You will need to fill it with water for a week, I'd say, just to make the wood rehydrate and inflate. 99% chance that it will leak for a while, so do it in the garage or something like that. The wood will inflate and it will stop leaking, and now you're good to go.

If it doesn't stop leaking, you can fix it with wax (capping wax used in wive bottling, or bee's wax)

For that big, boiling water is a point... you will need imagination! But anyways, here how I do for my little oak casks. From what I've been told.

So now your barrel is full of water, and you are ready to sanitize it. Next steps are:
- Empty it
- Fill it about half of boiling water, then shake it for a while to get rid of any wood debrits inside (some put a metal chain inside to scrape the inside surface)
- Empty, then refill with boiling water and Sodium Metabisulfite (1 tbs / gallon)
- Let sit for 24h, turn/roll it regularly
- Empty, rinse good 3 times.
- Refill it with clean water, let it sit for another 24h.
- Empty, and you're good to go.

Always keep full of water when not used.

I would make up a giant batch of cider and then secondary in that for as long as I can stand it being in the barrel. FWIW this is my hopeful plan for this summer/fall if we get a decent apple crop this year...

Thanks for all the responses. Sorry it took so long for me to get back to you all. We were waiting to have enough equipment ready to brew a few batches to get em in there.

Here is the story. We brewed 15 gallons of a Nut Brown Ale and stuck em in regular fermentors. Now Oaky (the cask) is full of water, gettting re-hydrated. We intend on using the Cask as a secondary, and filling it this weekend.

Issue: we cant heat up enough water to sanitize. Being that it has been sitting full of water, do you think it is enough to slosh some bourbon around in there, than add the already alcoholic beer to it?

Keep in mind we are only adding 15 gallons to a 53 gallon cask.

**Love the sour beer idea somebody had. My buddy is going on travel for a while, so we intend on brewing that stuff up, then letting it age for the year+ he is away!


Cheers,
Saul

You're going to need more than 15 gal for this. That's going to be a drop in a very large bucket. Our group has used the barrel as a primary, and we've always gotten them to at least 43 gal. The active ferment helps with the head space, and you dont' have to worry about anyone's sanitation regimen when adding all the beer at once (unless it's all your own beer). Make a stand for this sucker too, get it up! That way you can siphon out of it when you are ready to take it out. That barrel is heavy enough empty, full is a completely different story.

Here are my thoughts...

i envision adding camden tablets today and letting them sit for 2 days swishing around a few times each day, then emptying the cask. boiling two 6 gallon pots of water back to back and pouring them in with a siphon in the pot while its still boiling. swishing the water around so that it hits all areas and removes unwanted wood debris. then adding a handle of bourbon and swishing it around and leaving the cask in the position we want it when we add the beer for a day. then siphoning the beer in.

to get it out we'll need some sort of stand like that guy recommended. im thinking of just building a small stage out of wood that rises about 2 feet just so its higher than our secondary buckets. then we can easily siphon out.

thoughts?

Get some 2x6's, make some X's, and run a stringer between the two of them. It'll be a cradle for the barrel to sit on. Like I said, get it up high enough that you'll be able to get a siphon going once you want to empty it. Our barrel/cradle isn't at our place, or I would take a pic for you, sorry.

Where are you going to store this bad boy? Basement? Garage? Heated/non heated? Dry air? We got a barrel for our group (first time, dind't really do any research). A member hosted it in his basement (nice easy egress out). The basement housed the furnace, which created drier air. The barrel, as it sat and aged (with 43 gal in it), the top staves dried out on us because they weren't in contact with any liquid. This allowed for other things to get into the apple brandy barrel. Long story short, we now have a soured apple brandy russian imperial stout (tastes great, but was not intentionally soured). Our next brew was a DIPA that is pretty damn good, but we knew once it soured, it was going to stay soured.

This is why I'm saying 15 gal isn't going to be good for you in a 53 gal barrel. Not only will it take on a lot of of the oak characteristic (small amount of beer over a large face of oak), but you run the risk of the staves drying out on you because you dont' have enough liquid in there to keep them swelled.

Thanks for the suggestion! So one of the main concerns is that it will absorb too much bourbon flavor. What if we were to age it in there for 2 or 3 days ( or more, tasting it until we think it's ready). Would that short amount of time cause the exposed staves to dry out?

We don't really have any other options now in terms of making more beer so we're trying to figure out the best possible way to work with what we have. Ideally we would have gotten a smaller cask.

Oaky is currently in a non heated garage with temperatures fluctuating between 32 and 40 depending what part of the day it is.

Solara. It's your only hope.

Everyone brewd a batch for it. They can pull some anytime ONLY if they bring enough to replace it. Mind the angels share. Unless you keep it full to top, I wouldn't bother.

most people have been recommending pouring bourbon after emptying the cask of boiling water. what's the reason for this? sanitation? flavor? could whisky be used instead? the cask is from buffalo trace and we'd like that flavor to be infused into beer. would pouring jack daniels affect the flavor?

imisri said:

most people have been recommending pouring bourbon after emptying the cask of boiling water. what's the reason for this? sanitation? flavor? could whisky be used instead? the cask is from buffalo trace and we'd like that flavor to be infused into beer. would pouring jack daniels affect the flavor?

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After a barrel is used for whisky, it is empty of tannins (oak flavor), so what you get from bourbon barrel aging your beer is the whisky flavor and a slow oxydation. You only refresh bourbon flavor in barrel if you soak it before use. Virtually, putting the whisky right in beer would do the same thing, minus the slow oxydation. i've try whisky soaked chips in the past, but in the fiture i will put the whisky directly. Unless you put a very high abv beer, the risk of infection is really high, even inevitable if it's a used barrell.

Buffalo Trace is a great distillery. My younger brother actually got married there a couple years ago. Was a great place for a wedding and reception.

I wasn't a brewer at the time or I would probably have tried to get a barrel from them as well...

Good luck!

Tiroux said:

After a barrel is used for whisky, it is empty of tannins (oak flavor), so what you get from bourbon barrel aging your beer is the whisky flavor and a slow oxydation. You only refresh bourbon flavor in barrel if you soak it before use. Virtually, putting the whisky right in beer would do the same thing, minus the slow oxydation. i've try whisky soaked chips in the past, but in the fiture i will put the whisky directly. Unless you put a very high abv beer, the risk of infection is really high, even inevitable if it's a used barrell.

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I would disagree with this. There may be some science that I do not know, but all I can report is with my taste buds. We actually had our homebrew club meeting last night, and I brought a bottle of a RIS that was aged in a freshly used Heaven Hill Barrel. We primaried in there for 5 months. Damn if that beer didn't have a nice oak flavor in it (along with the whiskey of course).

If you don't fill the barrel all the way you risk acetobacter getting into your beer and serious oxidation. You'll end up with vinegar before you know it. Fill it all the way!


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