secretlevel
Well-Known Member
Very nice! Supposedly small barrels have much more surface area so you get more bourbon quicker! Any tips on how to get a barrel of this size?
Very nice! Supposedly small barrels have much more surface area so you get more bourbon quicker! Any tips on how to get a barrel of this size?
Very nice! Supposedly small barrels have much more surface area so you get more bourbon quicker! Any tips on how to get a barrel of this size?
Follow up on a version I made last year (see post #308):
This was my second attempt at a clone. I toasted and charred my own White Oak for this batch. After my first attempt, aged with about 4 oz of oak which had previously been soaked in 45% ABV Makers Mark Whiskey, didn't have anywhere near sufficient whiskey character I reasoned that part of the issue could be due to the real BCBS being aged with Barrel Proof Spirit which is about 60% ABV. To test this out, I aged this batch with about 6 oz of oak which had been soaked in Everclear diluted down to 60% ABV. My beer ended up stopping at a FG of 1.055 rather than at the target of 1.040. It tasted good so I decided to let it ride.
View attachment 702977
View attachment 702978
I aged the beer for 7 months on oak before bottling. The beer is delicious but, upon doing a side by side tasting (see blog post for this) with the real BCBS, I found that the balance of mine was way, way off (don't make my mistake with such a high FG) - too sweet. Additionally, the whiskey character was a bit improved with the 60% spirt soaked oak but it was still nowhere near as prominent as in BCBS
So, this was another tasty beer but a failure as a clone to BCBS.
For my third attempt (brewed back in August 2020), I've done a bit of re-assessment of the approach to oaking to match the profound whiskey character of BCBS.
I've done some analysis to determine how much oak I should be using. I have a couple interesting data points to arrive to an interesting conclusion:
- Oak preparation using 6x1x1 inch White Oak sticks toasted for 4 hrs and then charred aggressively, to get an alligator char, produces a sprit with lovely caramel and vanilla along with a perceived sweetness
- Aging with a 60% spirit provides a significantly increased flavor intensity over 45% spirit. I think this additional strength, if used in the correct volume, is a critical factor for cutting through the bold flavors of the BCBS base
- 6 oz of oak isn't enough. Evaluating oak additions by weight is maybe a flawed concept.
So, in conclusion, it seems that the 2 sticks per gal both closely matches the surface area of a 52 barrel and provides a good approximation of the spirit absorption rate observed in BCBS to get their alcohol increases (despite the end grain)
- First, and most obvious, is an assessment by surface area:
- A 53 gal barrel exposes each gal to 56 square inches of oak on average
- If I use a 6x1x1 inch oak stick at 26 square inches I would need 2 sticks per gal and a whopping 12 of these sticks for a 6 gal batch. I had used 3-4 of these sticks in my last batch
- Now, of course, a barrel doesn't expose end grain to the liquid as my sticks do which, we'd hypothesize, might change the way spirit absorbs into and interacts with the wood in some meaningful way
- For my second analysis, I've done an assessment on the absorption of 60% spirit into wood:
- The oak barrels used to age BCBS are freshly drained and have spirit soaked into the wood. This is pulled from the wood during the long aging of the beer to flavor the beer and increase the alcohol percentage. Looking at some numbers:
- BCBS has a target OG of 30 Brix and a target FG of 10.5 Brix for an 11.75% ABV. The bottled beer varies in ABV - you see anywhere from 13-16%. The extra alcohol extracted from the barrel is a big reason for that.
- I have a 2017 BCBS which is 14.1% ABV. 1 gal of the original 11.75% beer would have included 15 oz of pure alcohol while 1 gal of 14.1% beer had increased up to 18 oz of pure alcohol. This is an addition of 3 oz of pure alcohol per gal from the wood.
- Barrel proof spirit is 60% alcohol so we'd need 5 oz of this spirit to add 3 oz of pure alcohol.
- As an interesting sanity check, this would mean that for a 53 gal barrel there was 2 gal of spirit absorbed into the wood after draining. This seems plausible to me.
- I did an experiment where I took 4 sticks of my 6x1x1 inch wood and soaked them in 60% spirit for over a year. These started out weighing 11 oz. After the soak they were up to 20.4 oz. Let's assess these numbers:
- We picked up 9.4 oz of spirt by weight for 4 sticks of oak
- To convert from weight to volume, I weighed 1 cup (8oz) of spirit as 7.4 oz by weight. So, 9.4 oz of spirit by weight is just about 10 oz of spirit by volume
- 4 sticks absorbed 10 oz of spirit by volume which is 2.5 oz absorbed per stick
- So, we would need 5 oz of spirit added per gal to go from 11.75% ABV to 14.1% ABV like BCBS and, per my experiment, I would need 2 sticks per gal to add the equivalent amount of my spirt.
Based on this analysis I've decided to age my current beer with 12 sticks of 6x1x1 inch oak
View attachment 702982
This is in secondary and aging. I plan to give this until Fall 2021 before bottling. I'd had a stuck fermentation on this batch as well (hung at 1.055 again) but I opted to add some WLP 099 Super High Gravity yeast too it which has gotten it down to the target 1.040. I will follow up with results. If you want to read more about this experiment you can read my blog post here.
This is a risk to be taking with an expensive and time consuming beer. I'm comfortable with my analysis but would suggest caution to any other brewers trying this prior to seeing some results.
Follow up on a version I made last year (see post #308):
This was my second attempt at a clone. I toasted and charred my own White Oak for this batch. After my first attempt, aged with about 4 oz of oak which had previously been soaked in 45% ABV Makers Mark Whiskey, didn't have anywhere near sufficient whiskey character I reasoned that part of the issue could be due to the real BCBS being aged with Barrel Proof Spirit which is about 60% ABV. To test this out, I aged this batch with about 6 oz of oak which had been soaked in Everclear diluted down to 60% ABV. My beer ended up stopping at a FG of 1.055 rather than at the target of 1.040. It tasted good so I decided to let it ride.
View attachment 702977
View attachment 702978
I aged the beer for 7 months on oak before bottling. The beer is delicious but, upon doing a side by side tasting (see blog post for this) with the real BCBS, I found that the balance of mine was way, way off (don't make my mistake with such a high FG) - too sweet. Additionally, the whiskey character was a bit improved with the 60% spirt soaked oak but it was still nowhere near as prominent as in BCBS
So, this was another tasty beer but a failure as a clone to BCBS.
For my third attempt (brewed back in August 2020), I've done a bit of re-assessment of the approach to oaking to match the profound whiskey character of BCBS.
I've done some analysis to determine how much oak I should be using. I have a couple interesting data points to arrive to an interesting conclusion:
- Oak preparation using 6x1x1 inch White Oak sticks toasted for 4 hrs and then charred aggressively, to get an alligator char, produces a sprit with lovely caramel and vanilla along with a perceived sweetness
- Aging with a 60% spirit provides a significantly increased flavor intensity over 45% spirit. I think this additional strength, if used in the correct volume, is a critical factor for cutting through the bold flavors of the BCBS base
- 6 oz of oak isn't enough. Evaluating oak additions by weight is maybe a flawed concept.
So, in conclusion, it seems that the 2 sticks per gal both closely matches the surface area of a 52 barrel and provides a good approximation of the spirit absorption rate observed in BCBS to get their alcohol increases (despite the end grain)
- First, and most obvious, is an assessment by surface area:
- A 53 gal barrel exposes each gal to 56 square inches of oak on average
- If I use a 6x1x1 inch oak stick at 26 square inches I would need 2 sticks per gal and a whopping 12 of these sticks for a 6 gal batch. I had used 3-4 of these sticks in my last batch
- Now, of course, a barrel doesn't expose end grain to the liquid as my sticks do which, we'd hypothesize, might change the way spirit absorbs into and interacts with the wood in some meaningful way
- For my second analysis, I've done an assessment on the absorption of 60% spirit into wood:
- The oak barrels used to age BCBS are freshly drained and have spirit soaked into the wood. This is pulled from the wood during the long aging of the beer to flavor the beer and increase the alcohol percentage. Looking at some numbers:
- BCBS has a target OG of 30 Brix and a target FG of 10.5 Brix for an 11.75% ABV. The bottled beer varies in ABV - you see anywhere from 13-16%. The extra alcohol extracted from the barrel is a big reason for that.
- I have a 2017 BCBS which is 14.1% ABV. 1 gal of the original 11.75% beer would have included 15 oz of pure alcohol while 1 gal of 14.1% beer had increased up to 18 oz of pure alcohol. This is an addition of 3 oz of pure alcohol per gal from the wood.
- Barrel proof spirit is 60% alcohol so we'd need 5 oz of this spirit to add 3 oz of pure alcohol.
- As an interesting sanity check, this would mean that for a 53 gal barrel there was 2 gal of spirit absorbed into the wood after draining. This seems plausible to me.
- I did an experiment where I took 4 sticks of my 6x1x1 inch wood and soaked them in 60% spirit for over a year. These started out weighing 11 oz. After the soak they were up to 20.4 oz. Let's assess these numbers:
- We picked up 9.4 oz of spirt by weight for 4 sticks of oak
- To convert from weight to volume, I weighed 1 cup (8oz) of spirit as 7.4 oz by weight. So, 9.4 oz of spirit by weight is just about 10 oz of spirit by volume
- 4 sticks absorbed 10 oz of spirit by volume which is 2.5 oz absorbed per stick
- So, we would need 5 oz of spirit added per gal to go from 11.75% ABV to 14.1% ABV like BCBS and, per my experiment, I would need 2 sticks per gal to add the equivalent amount of my spirt.
Based on this analysis I've decided to age my current beer with 12 sticks of 6x1x1 inch oak
View attachment 702982
This is in secondary and aging. I plan to give this until Fall 2021 before bottling. I'd had a stuck fermentation on this batch as well (hung at 1.055 again) but I opted to add some WLP 099 Super High Gravity yeast too it which has gotten it down to the target 1.040. I will follow up with results. If you want to read more about this experiment you can read my blog post here.
This is a risk to be taking with an expensive and time consuming beer. I'm comfortable with my analysis but would suggest caution to any other brewers trying this prior to seeing some results.
So that’s 30 oz of booze? When I researched this, I saw people using 8-12 oz of booze and they all said it needed more. I used a 20L barrel with 3/4 bottle of woodford and it was slightly over the top. I am hoping it ages out a bit.
-Mark
I posted a similar question on your blog page... I've read and experienced that barrel-aging 5 gal batches goes much quicker than 53 gal barrels. Now that you have the surface area close, do you still plan to age for a year? If so, do you plan to sample along the way?Follow up on a version I made last year (see post #308):
This was my second attempt at a clone. I toasted and charred my own White Oak for this batch. After my first attempt, aged with about 4 oz of oak which had previously been soaked in 45% ABV Makers Mark Whiskey, didn't have anywhere near sufficient whiskey character I reasoned that part of the issue could be due to the real BCBS being aged with Barrel Proof Spirit which is about 60% ABV. To test this out, I aged this batch with about 6 oz of oak which had been soaked in Everclear diluted down to 60% ABV. My beer ended up stopping at a FG of 1.055 rather than at the target of 1.040. It tasted good so I decided to let it ride.
View attachment 702977
View attachment 702978
I aged the beer for 7 months on oak before bottling. The beer is delicious but, upon doing a side by side tasting (see blog post for this) with the real BCBS, I found that the balance of mine was way, way off (don't make my mistake with such a high FG) - too sweet. Additionally, the whiskey character was a bit improved with the 60% spirt soaked oak but it was still nowhere near as prominent as in BCBS
So, this was another tasty beer but a failure as a clone to BCBS.
For my third attempt (brewed back in August 2020), I've done a bit of re-assessment of the approach to oaking to match the profound whiskey character of BCBS.
I've done some analysis to determine how much oak I should be using. I have a couple interesting data points to arrive to an interesting conclusion:
- Oak preparation using 6x1x1 inch White Oak sticks toasted for 4 hrs and then charred aggressively, to get an alligator char, produces a sprit with lovely caramel and vanilla along with a perceived sweetness
- Aging with a 60% spirit provides a significantly increased flavor intensity over 45% spirit. I think this additional strength, if used in the correct volume, is a critical factor for cutting through the bold flavors of the BCBS base
- 6 oz of oak isn't enough. Evaluating oak additions by weight is maybe a flawed concept.
So, in conclusion, it seems that the 2 sticks per gal both closely matches the surface area of a 52 barrel and provides a good approximation of the spirit absorption rate observed in BCBS to get their alcohol increases (despite the end grain)
- First, and most obvious, is an assessment by surface area:
- A 53 gal barrel exposes each gal to 56 square inches of oak on average
- If I use a 6x1x1 inch oak stick at 26 square inches I would need 2 sticks per gal and a whopping 12 of these sticks for a 6 gal batch. I had used 3-4 of these sticks in my last batch
- Now, of course, a barrel doesn't expose end grain to the liquid as my sticks do which, we'd hypothesize, might change the way spirit absorbs into and interacts with the wood in some meaningful way
- For my second analysis, I've done an assessment on the absorption of 60% spirit into wood:
- The oak barrels used to age BCBS are freshly drained and have spirit soaked into the wood. This is pulled from the wood during the long aging of the beer to flavor the beer and increase the alcohol percentage. Looking at some numbers:
- BCBS has a target OG of 30 Brix and a target FG of 10.5 Brix for an 11.75% ABV. The bottled beer varies in ABV - you see anywhere from 13-16%. The extra alcohol extracted from the barrel is a big reason for that.
- I have a 2017 BCBS which is 14.1% ABV. 1 gal of the original 11.75% beer would have included 15 oz of pure alcohol while 1 gal of 14.1% beer had increased up to 18 oz of pure alcohol. This is an addition of 3 oz of pure alcohol per gal from the wood.
- Barrel proof spirit is 60% alcohol so we'd need 5 oz of this spirit to add 3 oz of pure alcohol.
- As an interesting sanity check, this would mean that for a 53 gal barrel there was 2 gal of spirit absorbed into the wood after draining. This seems plausible to me.
- I did an experiment where I took 4 sticks of my 6x1x1 inch wood and soaked them in 60% spirit for over a year. These started out weighing 11 oz. After the soak they were up to 20.4 oz. Let's assess these numbers:
- We picked up 9.4 oz of spirt by weight for 4 sticks of oak
- To convert from weight to volume, I weighed 1 cup (8oz) of spirit as 7.4 oz by weight. So, 9.4 oz of spirit by weight is just about 10 oz of spirit by volume
- 4 sticks absorbed 10 oz of spirit by volume which is 2.5 oz absorbed per stick
- So, we would need 5 oz of spirit added per gal to go from 11.75% ABV to 14.1% ABV like BCBS and, per my experiment, I would need 2 sticks per gal to add the equivalent amount of my spirt.
Based on this analysis I've decided to age my current beer with 12 sticks of 6x1x1 inch oak
View attachment 702982
This is in secondary and aging. I plan to give this until Fall 2021 before bottling. I'd had a stuck fermentation on this batch as well (hung at 1.055 again) but I opted to add some WLP 099 Super High Gravity yeast to it which has gotten it down to the target 1.040. I will follow up with results. If you want to read more about this experiment you can read my blog post here.
This is a risk to be taking with an expensive and time consuming beer. I'm comfortable with my analysis but would suggest caution to any other brewers trying this prior to seeing some results.
I posted a similar question on your blog page... I've read and experienced that barrel-aging 5 gal batches goes much quicker than 53 gal barrels. Now that you have the surface area close, do you still plan to age for a year? If so, do you plan to sample along the way?
Follow up on a version I made last year (see post #308):
This was my second attempt at a clone. I toasted and charred my own White Oak for this batch. After my first attempt, aged with about 4 oz of oak which had previously been soaked in 45% ABV Makers Mark Whiskey, didn't have anywhere near sufficient whiskey character I reasoned that part of the issue could be due to the real BCBS being aged with Barrel Proof Spirit which is about 60% ABV. To test this out, I aged this batch with about 6 oz of oak which had been soaked in Everclear diluted down to 60% ABV. My beer ended up stopping at a FG of 1.055 rather than at the target of 1.040. It tasted good so I decided to let it ride.
View attachment 702977
View attachment 702978
I aged the beer for 7 months on oak before bottling. The beer is delicious but, upon doing a side by side tasting (see blog post for this) with the real BCBS, I found that the balance of mine was way, way off (don't make my mistake with such a high FG) - too sweet. Additionally, the whiskey character was a bit improved with the 60% spirt soaked oak but it was still nowhere near as prominent as in BCBS
So, this was another tasty beer but a failure as a clone to BCBS.
For my third attempt (brewed back in August 2020), I've done a bit of re-assessment of the approach to oaking to match the profound whiskey character of BCBS.
I've done some analysis to determine how much oak I should be using. I have a couple interesting data points to arrive to an interesting conclusion:
- Oak preparation using 6x1x1 inch White Oak sticks toasted for 4 hrs and then charred aggressively, to get an alligator char, produces a sprit with lovely caramel and vanilla along with a perceived sweetness
- Aging with a 60% spirit provides a significantly increased flavor intensity over 45% spirit. I think this additional strength, if used in the correct volume, is a critical factor for cutting through the bold flavors of the BCBS base
- 6 oz of oak isn't enough. Evaluating oak additions by weight is maybe a flawed concept.
So, in conclusion, it seems that the 2 sticks per gal both closely matches the surface area of a 52 barrel and provides a good approximation of the spirit absorption rate observed in BCBS to get their alcohol increases (despite the end grain)
- First, and most obvious, is an assessment by surface area:
- A 53 gal barrel exposes each gal to 56 square inches of oak on average
- If I use a 6x1x1 inch oak stick at 26 square inches I would need 2 sticks per gal and a whopping 12 of these sticks for a 6 gal batch. I had used 3-4 of these sticks in my last batch
- Now, of course, a barrel doesn't expose end grain to the liquid as my sticks do which, we'd hypothesize, might change the way spirit absorbs into and interacts with the wood in some meaningful way
- For my second analysis, I've done an assessment on the absorption of 60% spirit into wood:
- The oak barrels used to age BCBS are freshly drained and have spirit soaked into the wood. This is pulled from the wood during the long aging of the beer to flavor the beer and increase the alcohol percentage. Looking at some numbers:
- BCBS has a target OG of 30 Brix and a target FG of 10.5 Brix for an 11.75% ABV. The bottled beer varies in ABV - you see anywhere from 13-16%. The extra alcohol extracted from the barrel is a big reason for that.
- I have a 2017 BCBS which is 14.1% ABV. 1 gal of the original 11.75% beer would have included 15 oz of pure alcohol while 1 gal of 14.1% beer had increased up to 18 oz of pure alcohol. This is an addition of 3 oz of pure alcohol per gal from the wood.
- Barrel proof spirit is 60% alcohol so we'd need 5 oz of this spirit to add 3 oz of pure alcohol.
- As an interesting sanity check, this would mean that for a 53 gal barrel there was 2 gal of spirit absorbed into the wood after draining. This seems plausible to me.
- I did an experiment where I took 4 sticks of my 6x1x1 inch wood and soaked them in 60% spirit for over a year. These started out weighing 11 oz. After the soak they were up to 20.4 oz. Let's assess these numbers:
- We picked up 9.4 oz of spirt by weight for 4 sticks of oak
- To convert from weight to volume, I weighed 1 cup (8oz) of spirit as 7.4 oz by weight. So, 9.4 oz of spirit by weight is just about 10 oz of spirit by volume
- 4 sticks absorbed 10 oz of spirit by volume which is 2.5 oz absorbed per stick
- So, we would need 5 oz of spirit added per gal to go from 11.75% ABV to 14.1% ABV like BCBS and, per my experiment, I would need 2 sticks per gal to add the equivalent amount of my spirt.
Based on this analysis I've decided to age my current beer with 12 sticks of 6x1x1 inch oak
View attachment 702982
This is in secondary and aging. I plan to give this until Fall 2021 before bottling. I'd had a stuck fermentation on this batch as well (hung at 1.055 again) but I opted to add some WLP 099 Super High Gravity yeast to it which has gotten it down to the target 1.040. I will follow up with results. If you want to read more about this experiment you can read my blog post here.
This is a risk to be taking with an expensive and time consuming beer. I'm comfortable with my analysis but would suggest caution to any other brewers trying this prior to seeing some results.
Has anyone taken an actual de-carbed sample of BCS to find out the true FG? I know there's some spec sheet data on Page 1, but I'm wondering how accurate that is. Also that's 2007, I think the beer has changed quite a bit since.
My stout seems to be stabilizing at 1.036. Ordering the barrel soon.
Thanks for the thorough post of your results! Very interesting!Takeaways:
- I've had better results using a 5 gallon barrel than oak cubes/staves
- Original BCS had more body and higher OG/FG than my version, contributing to more thickness and mouthfeel
- I preferred the malt selection and malt bill from my version. I believe Goose use all Briess, whereas I had more of a variety
- I will likely age the stout for 5-6 months in my next attempt
Thanks for the thorough post of your results! Very interesting!
So when comparing a 5 gallon barrel to using oak cubes/staves, it seems like you would need a heck of a lot of cubes/staves to equal the inside surface area of a barrel.
Any chance you could count how many staves are on your 5 gallon barrel and the average width of each one? Also the diameter of the ends?
What I'm thinking of doing is to determine the oak surface area of the inside of a 5 gallon barrel and then figure out how many stave/cubes would be equivalent to that.
I'd like to do a two batch, side by side comparison using a barrel and an equal surface area of staves/cubes.
Also, I'm wondering what Goose Island does to get more body/mouthfeel; higher mash temp? Dextrine Malt?
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