Souring and using wood barrels. General tips needed

[davekippen]

Hey gang, either my google-fu sucks, or there is not a lot out there for homebrewers on using wood barrels for aging and souring. Couple of questions, and if you have any other tips, tricks or processes that you can think of, please post!

I want to start using a barrel for sour aging. It appears that most of the previous content flavor will fade after the first few batches, then you get mostly wood notes, then eventually no flavor from the barrel, correct?

I plan on aging in the barrels for some amount of time. I anticipate there will be some type of trub left over from the yeast/bacteria after I rack to bottles/kegs whatever. Do you try and remove any of this before racking a new beer into the barrel? How often do you try and remove it? (obviously you want some wild things in there...) How the hell WOULD you remove it??

What else?

 

[Bensiff]

There are a couple books on sours you should check out. To give you an overview, yes you will get character from what was previously in the barrel that will diminish over a few batches and like you said the wood character itself will slowly diminish resulting in a neutral barrel. You can choose to do the full ferment in the barrel or rack a finished beer into the barrel. When you introduce the bugs they will work their way into the wood so there is no worry about rinsing the barrel to get the trub out and then hitting it with some high temp water to give a bit of sanitization and cleaning.

 

[davekippen]

Cool thanks. If you think of the named of the books you recommend let me know

 

[ChefRex]

Our own Oldsock http://www.themadfermentationist.com/

Covers it his book http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938469119/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

 

[Bensiff]

American Sour Beers is a great book on the subject. There is also Wild Ferments by Jeff Sparrow that is an ok read. Finally is Lambic by Jean-Xavier Guinard, this one is out of print and goes for a lot of money; but if you work at it you can find a zip file of the book on the Internet. Also, the 11/23/2008 Sunday Session with Shea Comfort is an outstanding wealth of knowledge on oak barrels.

 

[davekippen]

Awesome! You guys rock. Just booted up that podcast, checking it out now!