We've been kicking around the used barrel concept for a while. A few have been made available to us, but we passed because the standard barrels are 55/60 gallons. Making that much beer in a short time at our scale is out of reach. Instead, we've had reasonable success using soaked oak chips in our secondary fermenters (Flanders Deel Twee and Variations on a Theme: At Giza).30 gallons now puts us in a 'we can probably pull this off' spot, so we'll make the attempt.
Logistics, planning and meticulous execution will be needed to make this thing work. At least this will be infinitely more rewarding than the day job. At a minimum, we'll need to brewing three 10-gallon batches in the same day (or weekend). Due to our set-up those batches will have to primary in six 5-gallon primaries simultaneously. This also means six yeast starters and we haven't even thought about how we'll be introducing the bugs to the barrel. There also the matter of crash course in barrel maintenance.
In any case, the planning starts now. In terms of recipe, we'd like the barrel to have a nice role in the final flavor and it's a big red, so we're thinking a brown ale at the moment that we can sour in the barrel. We'll be documenting the project with the label "Barrel" and will update the label when the recipe is decided.In the meantime, also experimenting with ramping up dregs from some of our favorite sours to see if they can be utilized in this project. Orval, Supplication and Gueze Giradin 1882 blend currently in progress.
Huge thanks to our friend at CrushPad for hooking us up with new addition to the family. Chaos.
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