Roll Out The…

WHOA!

Yes, we’re
talking about barrel-aged beers, but this isn’t about
oom-pah bands and whirling dirndls and whoopee. This is
about brewers who are using wooden barrels to add new
flavors and depths of complexity to beer, a truly innovative
move that represents the best traditions of American brewing
– and Belgian brewing – and American distilling. Talk about
your new depths of complexity.

The first
question about barrel-aged beers is probably “Why?” After
all, we’ve reached an age of stainless steel fermenters,
caustic washes, freshness dating, and practically air- and
light-free packaging. Why take a giant step backwards 23OO
years to the wooden barrel?

“Flavor!” shouts
Dan Weirback, founder of Weyerbacher Brewing in Easton,
Pennsylvania. “In fact, I’ll give you three reasons: flavor,
flavor and flavor.” Weirback’s brewery is known for big
beers, and his barrel-aged beers – Heresy, Insanity and
Prophecy – are some of the biggest.

Allagash’s Rob
Tod had a before and after answer. “If you’d asked me before
I did it, I’d say just for something different, something to
have fun. We’d talked about doing it for years, and finally
just got some barrels and did it. Now, though, it’s
staggering what the wood does to the beer. It’s almost
another beer.”

JUST
TOO USEFUL
Archeologists believe that barrels were first made by the
Celts in France and Spain, around 35O BC, and used for
transporting goods: wine, oil, sulphur, dried fish, salted
foods, pickled foods, and a myriad other things including
the deadly inflammable weapon of war known as Greek fire. It
was a container that was so universally useful that it was
quickly adopted by other Mediterranean cultures.

Winemakers took
to barrels strongly in both France and Italy, although it’s
an unanswered question as to when the barrel’s role in aging
and flavoring the wine was discovered. Wood’s role in aging
bourbon was discovered in the early to mid-18OOs. Various
sources that refer to bourbon as “red” liquor indicate that
someone had learned that aging “white lightning” in charred
oak barrels changed both the color and the flavor of the
previously vodka-like spirit.

The other
contribution that wood can make to beer is that of providing
a playground for various microflora, as discussed in my
recent beverage piece on “bug beers”. That’s where Rob Tod
described where he got the brettanomyces culture for
Allagash’s Interlude. “We tasted one of our 2-year-old
barrels of Double, and it had a definite, pleasant, clean
brett character,” he said. “We had a house Brett culture,
which was kind of cool.”

Cool, but no
news to Belgian brewers like Orval and Cantillon, who’ve
been brewing with brett-infested wooden barrels for years.
They have inspired advanced American homebrewers, and now
that’s reaching into the commercial field, with brewers like
Tod.

What a brewer
will do with the barrel, then, depends on why he wants the
barrel. Is it for what’s already in the barrel – bourbon
flavor, vanillin compounds and a general woody flavor – or
for what he can keep in the wood – beneficial souring
bacteria and wild yeasts?

If it’s for the
wood or bourbony flavors, that’s not really new territory.
Brewers have been doing that for years. I remember the 1996
Great American Beer Festival (GABF), where all the buzz was
about Goose Island’s Bourbon County stout. We tasted that,
and the bourbon barrel-aged stout that the Denver Rock
Bottom had done for the festival. Todd Ashman did a lot of
work with barrel beers at Flossmoor Station brewpub in
Chicago, perhaps culminating in 2OO4 with his “Trainwreck of
Flavor”, a huge, high-alcohol blend of brown ale and
barleywine aged in Jack Daniel’s barrels.

So
bourbon/whiskey barrel beers aren’t new. What is new is
their popularity. Old Dominion has seen great success in the
Virginia market with their Oak Barrel Stout, Weyerbacher has
expanded their whiskey barrel line with great success, and
the GABF has added a barrel-aged beer category.

BEER
DRINKING WHISKEY
With whiskey barrels beers, things are relatively simple.
It’s all about extracting flavor from the barrel. When you
think about it, that’s all bourbon distillers are looking
for in the warehouse, but they do it over years. Thanks to
that prep work, things become a lot easier and quicker for
the brewer.

Rob Tod looks at
it like an accelerated aging process. “When you put beer in
a fresh bourbon barrel, you’re immediately aging the beer
for years,” he said. “It sucks the bourbon from the pores of
the wood, and that carries with it the wood character that
it’s been pulling out of the wood for at least four years.”
The bourbon’s done the long hard work, and the beer can come
along and quickly reap the benefits.

Paul Davis is
doing barrel-aging at Thomas Hooker Brewing in Hartford,
Connecticut, and has a similar approach to Tod. “I age in
the oak from one to four months,” he said. “Any less than
that and I don’t get the subtle bourbon flavors, just the
burnt flavor. Any more than 4 months is purely a need to
rotate the casks to the next beer.”

Weirback is not
looking for subtlety. “We use fresh bourbon barrels, one
time only,” he said. “A lot of times people think you need
to age it for three to six months. That’s true if you’re
re-using the barrels. But we want consistency for every
batch, so we just use them once. You know, the bourbon’s
been in there for four years, and the flavor’s just waiting
there.”

What’s going on
in there? Oak is full of sugars, vanillin compounds similar
to vanilla, and tannin. That’s why winemakers use oak;
they’ve become enamored of the flavors it can impart to
wine. Bourbon distillers use it for the same
reason.

“I don’t know
anything about wine,” Rob Tod admitted, although he said
knows what he likes to drink. “Is it the same going into the
wood as it is coming out? Beer’s more delicate, and the wood
really changes it. It softens up and balances the
higher-gravity beers. Is it the vanillins? The tannins? If
you ask 1O different people, you’d get 1O different answers.
I don’t know, but it really softens the beer. Eight weeks in
the bourbon barrels seems to be a perfect balance between
getting that character out without getting too much tannins
for our beers.”

Allagash is
doing a whole line of barrel-aged beers these days. The
first was the Curieux, which I learned is not wholly
oak-aged; in fact, that’s how Tod does it. “Hardly any of
our beers are 1OO% barrel-aged,” he said. “Adding
non-wood-aged beer actually adds a level of complexity. It
allows the refinements of the wood come out. We taste new
batches of Curieux with 5, 1O, 15, 2O, and 25% barrel-aged
beer blended in, and usually wind up around the 12%
mark.”

Allagash
Odyssey, which Tod promises will return later this year, is
aged in new American oak barrels. It’s all about the
difference in wood flavor. “We get an almost coconutty
flavor from the bourbon barrels,” he said. “We can taste a
difference in the different Jim Beams, and we only use Jim
Beam white label barrels now. But from the new oak we got
more of a roast vanilla character.”

They have
another new beer, called Musette. “‘Musette’ is a sack, a
bag, or a bagpipe,” said Tod. “We wanted to do a Scotch ale,
which is a style that has a lot of roots in Belgium.” Scotch
ales became popular in Belgium during World War I, when the
various Scottish regiments with the British Expeditionary
Force had their favorite beers from home shipped over.
Belgians tasted them, liked them, and some Belgian brewers
put their own spin on them; Brasserie Silly still makes one
that is exported to the US and is quite good.

“We put some of
the first runnings in the kettle and did some caramelization
on it,” Tod said, “down to almost a syrup, then put the rest
of the wort in. The final beer is a blend of a batch aged in
bourbon barrels and a batch aged in stainless. For the
Musette we’re using barrels we’ve already used for Curieux,
just to get a touch.”

Paul Davis ages
his Old Marley barleywine in bourbon casks mostly for the
flavor additions, but admitted that some of the reason is
sentimental. “I always liked the image of a special craft
brew tucked away in a wooden cask for a time, where some
mystery could be reintroduced into the beer,” he said. “I
started with a barleywine because I wanted to round out the
hot ethanol feeling and flavor with the vanillin and coconut
flavors I associated with fine bourbons. I was inspired by
other brewers who had new flavors with their stronger beers
and I thought barleywine could handle additional
flavors.”

Talking to Davis
made me wonder: if you’re pouring beer into barrels, and
leaving it there for a month or more, unrefrigerated, won’t
it go bad, or at least go terminally flat? Turns out ‘flat’
isn’t really an issue. “I rack conditioned beer that has not
been carbonated into oak barrels,” he said. “I consider the
oak aging to be part of the conditioning process and I
krausened post-racking out of the oak. (Krausening is a
natural carbonation technique.) I generally store beer in
the casks in the winter at ambient conditions in the
brewery, which is temperatures in the low 6O degree’s F. I
only use strong, mostly hoppy beers in the oak so there are
some antibacterial properties at work. I also sanitize the
barrels with citric acid and very hot water before filling
with beer.”

Dan Weirback
trusts his new, first-fill-only barrels to take care of the
beer, and trusts his big beers to take care of themselves.
“The alcohol in the beer is high enough that you don’t have
to worry much about it,” he said. “It’s room temperature,
but higher alcohol beers keep pretty safely. That’s 9O% of
the story. And very few bacteria can live in a whiskey
barrel environment: it’s over 1OO proof in there when we get
it.”

BUGS
IN THE WOOD Once
the whiskey’s out of the wood, though, bacteria love the
porous surface and sub-surface of barrel staves. There are
just so many places for them to hide, and plenty of sugary
food in there for them to eat. That’s why wooden barrels
have been popular, practically essential, for bug beer
brewers, the folks who treasure and prize the sour, funky
notes of wild fermentation. These beers haven’t gone ‘bad’,
they’re just getting good!

That’s what Ron
Jeffries has focused on at his Jolly Pumpkin brewery in
Dexter, Michigan. All the beers Jeffries brews are aged in
oak barrels for just that reason, and yes, it’s intentional.
Sometimes he has to explain that to people.

“We were at a
festival last month,” he told me, “and I brought a cask. The
breweries I was working for before brewed mostly British
styles, and I know quite a bit about cask ale; I love it.
Anyway, we had our cask up on the table, and a British
gentleman saw the cask and got excited to see cask ale. He
got a glass, took a sip, and then got very quiet. He
motioned me over and said, quietly, “You do know your cask
has gone off, don’t you?” I explained that I did, and it was
intentional for the style of beer. Happily, he understood,
and once it had been explained he was pleased with the
beer!”

Jeffries is
doing something out of the ordinary at Jolly Pumpkin,
something only one or two other brewers that I know of are
doing. “We’d played around with bourbon barrel stouts and
like that, and played around with lambics in steel vessels,”
he said. “You can make beer that way, even good ones, but
they lack complexity. We’re looking for the sort of flavor
you can only get through wild yeast and souring organisms.
The most natural way to get that is to use oak, and get the
living organisms to live in the oak.”

So rather than
buy cultures, or source out ‘pre-infected’ wood, Jeffries
did something really gutsy, bold and crazy. He went local.
“The wild yeast that we allow to inhabit the oak? That’s all
natural, from the air around us,” he said. “In my experience
in the past, having bought cultures, they lacked the depth
of natural cultures. Ours is all natural, local. Mostly
Dexter, MI, organisms. We don’t filter, and the live
organisms continue to change things in the bottle. You can’t
really get these complex flavors any other way. I wanted to
do that since I started.”

But the really
bold move Jeffries made was to start with the oak, and stay
the course as the beer – and the oak – evolved. “Our first
few batches didn’t have those characteristics, the sourness,
the depth,” he said, and I agreed. I got some bottles from
those first few batches, hand-delivered by some friendly
beer geeks who thought I should try beer from this cool new
brewery. It was not what I expected.

The labels were
gorgeous; Jolly Pumpkin’s labels are some of the very best
in a business full of artistic labels. The beers were
interesting in direction. But when I opened two of them on
the same afternoon, all I could taste was the oak, like
licking raw wood. I remember thinking, is this guy nuts?
This isn’t barrel-aged beer, this is wood beer!

I’ve had Jolly
Pumpkin since then, and have a much different opinion. The
beer’s changed as the barrels’ population of bugs changed
and matured. “That’s the only way to do it,” Jeffries said.
“You do still get wood flavor as well. That goes down as you
use them, but it can swing back. I’m having our artist re-do
our labels to reflect the change; the La Roja in particular
is more the way I want it. The names will be the same, but
the slight change in labeling will reflect it.” Bold move,
bold beer.

Even bolder is
Jeffries next project:lambic. “We’re about to rack over our
second batch of lambic-style beer,” he said. “I always
wanted to be a lambic producer: it’s a very traditional
process. We did the wacky mashing process, the extended boil
with aged hops, and we used our shortest, shallowest open
fermenter as a cool-ship overnight, then put the beer into
our sourest barrels. After a few years, we can start
blending. I’ve smelled the barrels from last year’s batch,
and they smell like they’re getting there.” No word on what
he’ll call it; the Belgians get very protective of the word
‘lambic’, though there is no official controlled appellation
yet (it’s still in process with the EU
bureaucracy).

“Barrels are a
lot of fun,” Jeffries said. “The Roja does have a note of
bourbon to it; we use bourbon barrels over and over. We’re
looking for just a hint of that. We’re using a Flanders
style with American bourbon barrels. We’ll select what
barrels we’re going to blend, then go around and collect
them, blend them, and bottle. It’s something very few people
are doing: to be devoted to it. I don’t know anyone else
who’s doing it that way.”

Concord Brewery
is doing something similar with their Rapscallion Creation
beer, but not quite as far out on the edge. “We do about 2O%
of the beer in old Jack Daniel’s barrels,” brewer David
Wilson told me. “The Creation is in wood for two to six
months. The barrels have been in beer use for so long that
there’s not really bourbon flavor in there any more. You’re
getting the various bacterial growths that are living in
there, each of them has a different one. How long it sits in
the wood determines which characteristics will dominate. We
throw the beer in the kettle after blending and boil it to
kill the wild yeast and bacteria, then add sugar and live
yeast.”

Creation, like
many of these beers, is not easily pigeon-holed. “It’s a
‘Belgianesque’ variety,” Wilson said. “It’s its own animal,
not brewed to any particular style. It’s kind of a dark
Belgian strong ale, about 9.5% ABV. It’s the highest alcohol
beer we make here at the brewery.”

There’s wood
action going on off-shore at Cisco Brewing on Nantucket
Island, too. Cisco has an advantage in that their distillery
and winery produce barrels to use at the brewery; a wholly
in-house operation that is under their control from start to
finish. They’ve used outside barrels, but as in-house
production continues, it will become more and more a purely
Nantucket operation.

Brewer Jeremy
Reger described the process he used for making Cisco’s Ten,
their tenth anniversary ale. “We aged Baggywrinkle in Jim
Beam barrels for a year,” he said. “Then we ‘watered it
down’ with Whale’s Tale pale ale to about 1O% ABV and added
sliced strawberries right into the barrel. We were picking
up brett hints from the barrel. It re-fermented with the
strawberries, and there was brett on them as well. After it
came out of the barrel, we cold-conditioned it in a tank.
Then we added sugar and a lager yeast in the bottle. It’s an
amazing beer.

“It was a
playful experimentation and happenstance,” he said, the kind
of inspiration that hits a lot at Cisco. “We are going to do
more. I did a barrel-aged stout last year, and added
cranberries to it. It had a merlot-like character, and oak
hints. We’re putting a 7 to 8% stout in barrels right now.
We had some extra stout and didn’t want to bottle it all.
It’s not really a science for us. In the last year, I’ve
gotten a lot more interested. As we free up more bourbon
barrels, we’ll do more. We’re so busy in the summer that we
do things like this when we get the chance.”

FAD,
GIMMICK OR LEGIT?
Is barrel-aged beer, either bourbon or buggy, something
that’s going to last? Or will it be a raspberry beer flash
in the pan?

“I think a bit
of both,” said Jeffries. “Craft beer sales are growing every
year again, and people are getting more adventurous, looking
for the next new thing. That’s where you find a lot of these
bourbon-aged beers, overwhelming and pushing the senses. I
don’t see that staying popular for years and years; they’re
just too big. I may be optimistic, but I think sour beers
are the next IPA. A lot of people, who come in and aren’t
familiar with what we do, ask, ‘Do you guys have an IPA?’.
Not really. But the tartness is a flavor people like. I see
more and more brewers doing sour-style beers, and more and
more people liking them and getting turned on to
them.”

“I think the
category will grow, people will continue to enjoy these
beers,” said Rob Tod. “Look what happens in the wine
industry. Merlot was huge a few years ago, now it’s not as
big, but it still sells a lot. I think that’s how this will
be: after the excitement dies down a bit, people will still
be drinking these. Is it a legitimate type of beer? I think
so, yes.”

Paul Davis is a
little concerned about short cuts. “Like all things in the
craft brew industry, innovation derived from tradition just
makes sense,” he said, in a very good point. “Of course,
there may be the temptation to just put something into oak
or use oak chips for the marketing potential. I’ll leave it
to the consumer to find the real deal. It always seems to
work out that way.”

“A fad?” asked
Dan Weirback. “A fad means everyone will buy it, like it,
and then stop buying it. I don’t think it’s a fad, but
doesn’t just about every beer style come out like that? I
don’t know how to define a fad any more. I think they’ll be
buying these beers several times a year. It’s all about
being different and having a plethora of styles to
choose.”

Finally, the
brewer who’s been doing barrel-aged beers in Massachusetts
the longest, a brewer that several others mentioned with
respect, sells all his beers on draft. Will Meyers is the
head brewer at the Cambridge Brewing brewpub. “We’ve been
barrel-aging beer in the wood for about seven years now,” he
said. “However, they are only available at our pub, on
draft, and occasionally at a local specialty bar. With a
recent build-out in our cellar, we now have over two dozen
wine barrels and bourbon barrels, and we will be doing our
best to have something from the wood on tap at all
times.”

That’s the kind
of innovation this category, this niche, is all about. You
should expect to see more of these woody beers on a shelf
near you.