I am getting a 45 gal wine barrel for free!!! What to do with it?

[jmilton1987]

A friend of mine is giving me a 45 gal barrel of wine from the brewery he works at. My question is now: What to fill it with? I would love to do a sour but I don't want to always make 45 gal of sour beer at a time/ruin it for other beers yet. I normally do 10 gal all grain batches, but i can arrange a big brew day with friends to make this batch in one brew day. I am thinking a big RIS or Porter. I have been told that big Belgians go well in wine barrels, but I am unsure as to which "Style" of Belgian ale would go well. I am a malt head first and fore most and was thinking about doing a BdG or a Saison in it, but that is just me. Please let me know if anyone has any experience with using wine barrels, and tips.

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

As far as the barrel and any flavor you are going to get from wine or oak depends on how much it was used before being decommissioned. You will likely get some wine flavor for the first few batches before most of it gets leached out into the beer.

A dubbel, porter, RIS, brown ale, saison, biere de garde, tripel, barleywine, tripel, etc. would all be acceptable. Lots of breweries are putting all kinds of beer on oak/in barrels with good success so you are definitely not limited by traditional oak aging practices. You could always brew a neutral base beer and then split it up and do secondaries on fruit, with brett, blended with other beers, etc. Anything you want to make needs to be something you're prepared to bottle/keg and consume 40-45 gallons. That's a lot of beer so you may want to go in with several people and decide on a style everybody would enjoy.