Historical evidence of Bourbon Barrel–aging

[beercraftbook]

I'm looking to brew a (fairly) historically accurate "stale" English porter—sour, barrel-aged—and I'm wondering if there's any evidence of British brewers using old whisky barrels (Scotch, bourbon, etc) to age their beers. Has anyone come across mentions of this in the record?

Thanks friends!

 

[Rip]

Check out the web site for 'Shut up about Barclay Perkins' - there's some quality research on historical brewing infos...(can be a little esoteric, but that's golden). There's a link below for google search of that site looking for the word 'cask'. I think Barrel was generally used as a measurement, less often to describe the container. Try searching for terms like: Cask, Foeder, Oak, etc, instead of barrel.

Google-FU:
"cask site:http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/"

http://tinyurl.com/7vmzx5jhttp://tinyurl.com/7vmzx5j

Mike

 

[patto1ro]

I'm looking to brew a (fairly) historically accurate "stale" English porter—sour, barrel-aged—and I'm wondering if there's any evidence of British brewers using old whisky barrels (Scotch, bourbon, etc) to age their beers. Has anyone come across mentions of this in the record?

Thanks friends!

No. Porter was aged in specially constructed vats that were far larger than whisky barrels. A hogshead (54 gallons) was usually the largest barrel used for whisky. Porter tuns held thousands of gallons.

Porter wasn't sour in the way a modern lambic is. It was a little tart, but not out and out sour. That would have been regarded as a fault.

As for the barrel-aging bit, that wasn't like the modern concept at all. They specifically didn't want any wood character in the beer. So they used oak that had little flavour and seasoned before use to remove that. The idea was to let the beer acquire the aged flavour, which came from a long slow secondary fermentation with brettanomyces. The British type of brettanomyces that causes little sourness.