B.O.M.B. Barrel Fill!

I recently posted a recipe as part of a barrel project I started with ten other brewers. We all brewed similar imperial stouts and then filled a 23-year old, 52 gallon brandy barrel this past Saturday. Everything went pretty smoothly, although once it was full we went upstairs for a delicious dinner and returned to find beer leaking out the top!

It turns out that the staves swelled and pushed some beer back out. Not a big deal. We siphoned 1/3 gallon back out to make a little headspace and let the wood do its thing. Luckily, we ended up with an extra gallon or so of beer, so that is being stored in sanitized growlers (although he may have bottled it uncarbed by now to preserve it) and that will be used to top off the barrel shortly.

Aside from that, we had a great time! People brought lots of great beer to share including a BIG bottle of 2004 Stone Oaked Arrogant Bastard, Jolly Pumpkin Bam, Southern Tier's Cuvee series of oak aged beers, Lakefront Rosie Kreik
and others.

Unlike most of my posts, this one doesn't have a recipe to archive. Here are a few of the pictures from our night though. Hopefully the Barrel of Monkeys Brewers will procure another barrel or two in the future and keep exploring barrel-aging homebrewed beer!

Barrel of Monkeys Brewers (B.O.M.B!)

Sometime last year, the availability of used bourbon barrels from Sprecher Brewery's beers was brought up at one of our local homebrew club meetings. It was suggested that we put together a recipe and do a group brew to age in the barrel. Then we went on to the next order of business.

A month later, it was mentioned that there were barrels available if anyone was interested in doing a barrel brew still. A few people thought it was a good idea. Then we went on to the next order of business.

A month later. . . you get the idea. Eventually the idea just died.

However, it was in the back of my head and I decided to eventually do something about it. So, I went to people individually who I thought might be interested in brewing a sour beer to put into a barrel. We got a nice group of good brewers together.

We were hoping for a wine barrel, but couldn't find one available in our area. We settled on an easier to obtain bourbon barrel since that's what we could get. That being the case, I suggested we do a strong, dark beer to stand up to the still relatively fresh oak character and any residual bourbon alcohol. Last winter I brewed an Imperial Stout recipe using the Bugfarm3 blend I had gotten via AlB from the babblebelt.com web forum. It is still aging, but is shaping up to be among my best beers. We eventually decided on that recipe, although we scaled the OG down a bit from my 1.105. We've all been shooting for 1.085, although a few people overshot that. No big deal in this case.

Over the last few months of planning we've added a few people, including one or 2 guys I hadn't met before that some of the other guys knew. We also found out that one of the main suppliers of used barrels to micros all over the US is within 2 hours of us here in Wisconsin! He has wine barrels, brandy barrels, and all sorts of good stuff available! Since we'd settled on a recipe already, we stuck with that and went with a brandy barrel. Apparently it is a 23 year old barrel. It shouldn't have much oak character left at this point, but we're really using it more as a vessel to inoculate with bugs for future brews.

My hope is that we'll put a couple long term batches through it, and then start using it solera style, where we draw off a portion of the beer every 6-12 months and replace it with new beer. After awhile it settles into an average age of a couple years or so, depending on the frequency and amount of beer pulled out & replaced.

One of the guys supposedly picked up the barrel yesterday and our fill date is coming up soon! Things are shaping up with this fun project and I'm happy I could get some people together to share ideas, homebrew, and have a good time playing mad scientists!

It is my hope that we can get a wine barrel this spring to house in my basement (or elsewhere if someone really wants to.) That way we could have a couple projects going at once. One with darker beers, and one with farmhouse type stuff and maybe eventually a lambic-inspired beer or sour ale like a Flanders.

Our recipe was based off of the Jolly Pumpkin Dark Dawn clone done on the BN awhile back. We raised our gravity to around 1.085, as mentioned above.


B.O.M.B. Sour Imperial Stout

brewed on: 10/11/10
OG: 1.086
IBUs: 34 IBUs
mash temp: 152F

mash:
7 lb 4 oz Belgian Pils malt
1 lb 10 oz Roasted Barley
1 lb 10 oz US 2-row
1 lb 3 oz German Munich
1 lb Wheat malt
8 oz Crystal 80L
4 oz Black malt

boil:
10 oz Turbinado sugar
8 oz Table Sugar
6 oz Honey

Hops:
.5 oz US Nugget @ 13.7% - 60 minutes
1 oz Fuggle @ 5% - 30 minutes

Yeast/bugs:
Split batch -
1) 3rd generation Roselare cake
2) Dirty Dozen bug blend


The rest of the guys brewing for this fermented their batches with the Wyeast Ardennes strain. I'll be adding my 5 gallons shortly thereafter to provide the bugs to inoculate this batch and the barrel.

For sugar, we decided that, rather than getting super picky, we would go with 3 different additions. One would be corn sugar or table sugar, one would be an unrefined sugar, whether it be turbinado, jaggery, piloncillo, etc. The third would be honey. While most of the guys went with table sugar, I think there was a bit of variation in the unrefined sugar used. I know several batches were done with jaggery, but I also saw bags of turbinado and piloncillo around at various brew sessions as well.

Grand Cru w/ honey & Roselare

As I get closer to brewing a 5 gallon bug starter for the barrel project I have planned with my Barrel of Monkey Brewers (or BOMB) friends, I brewed a medium strength Belgian today for the second generation of my Roselare slurry. The blend was originally pitched into a Grisette wort. Although Ive heard that Roselare blend takes a couple generations to get sour, I have to admit I was hoping for at least a little something. I tasted a hydrometer sample while racking the Grisette to secondary and it tasted mostly malty so far. I guess I got spoiled by AlB's (of the Burgundian Babble Belt) Bugfarm blend I used last winter. Luckily I have 2 vials of his Bugfarm4 belnd waiting to be used! Anyway, I'm hoping this latest batch gets a bit more character quicker from the bugs. We'll see!

Grand Cru

brewed on: 10/4/2010
OG: 1.061 (I was shooting for 1.064, but subbed in an equal amount of honey for table sugar, and didn't boil down quite as far as I expected.)
IBUs: 23 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
11 lbs. Belgian pale malt
5 oz. Carastan
3 oz. pale chocolate malt

other fermentables:
1 lb. honey (dissolved in 1 c. of boiling water on the stove, then added at 30 minutes.)

Hops:
2 oz Styrian Goldings @ 3.5% - 60 minutes
0.7 oz. UK Kent Goldings @ 5% - 2 minutes

Yeast:
2nd generation Roselare


This slurry was seriously ready to go. After pitching, the airlock was showing bubbles in under an hour and now, 5 hours later it is some of the most intense airlock activity I've seen!

10/19/10 - Racked to secondary. SG: 1.010

Sour Grisette

I recently got a group of guys together to start a barrel project. I'm pretty excited about it and they are all good brewers! What we decided on for our first batch is the Dark Dawn recipe I brewed over the winter, and since there isn't a Bugfarm blend available from AlB on BBB right now, we're using Roselare blend from Wyeast. I've heard from many sources that Roselare doesn't really get sour until the 2nd or 3rd generation, so I am building up one or two starter batches first.

The plan is that everyone is brewing the same Imperial Stout recipe and fermenting it clean with Ardennes yeast in their primaries. We'll then add it to our barrel. We'll fill the entire barrel with the clean version of the beer, then after a couple weeks, draw 5 gallons back out to see what the barrel added in a short amount of time, and I'll replace it with my buggy batch. We'll see how it's doing after about 6 months. At that point, the plan is to take it out and put another batch in, but we'll see how it is aging and decide from there.

We found a guy (Tom Griffin) who lives a couple hours away here in Wisconsin and supplies used spirit and wine barrels to many of the breweries around the country including Lost Abbey and Jolly Pumpkin! One of our guys gave him a call and he's apparently a really nice guy. He was happy to sell us a single barrel at the same price he sells in bulk to the breweries. Here's an article about him:

http://draftmag.com/magazine/articles/169

We decided on a brandy barrel for now. When we originally got together we wanted a wine barrel, but couldn't locate one at the time, so we were going to use a Jack Daniels bourbon barrel since they were easy to get a a hold of. By the time we got in touch with Tom we had already formulated a recipe that we thought could stand up to the bourbon character left in the barrel and bought yeast and bulk base grain. We decided, rather than scrapping the plan and starting over, to use the same recipe in a brandy barrel, then in a few months get a wine barrel as well. I'm hoping to do some farmhouse style ales in the wine barrel using just brett, rather than a huge bug slurry to start with.

As a starter for the bugs for this barrel though, I decided to brew a simple Grisette, but ferment it solely with Roselare blend to get it started. I'll probably do one more batch on this yeast cake soon, before the Dark Dawn batch. Here is the recipe:

Grisette d'Roselare

brewed on: 9/20/2010
expected OG: 1.046
Expected IBUs: 23 IBUs
mash temp: 152F

mash:
7 lbs Belgian Pils malt
2 lbs 4 oz German Wheat malt


Hops:
1.5 oz Hallertauer @ 3.5% (60 minutes)
0.7 oz Styrian Golding @ 3.4% (15 minutes)
0.5 oz Kent Golding @ 5% (1 minute)

Yeast
Wyeast 3763 - Roselare Blend

10/4/10 - SG @ 1.006. Racked to secondary. Flavor is malty with maybe a hint of diacetyl in the nose. Hopefully it's just the beginnings of some lactic fermentation that I interpreted as a hint of butter. No noticeable sourness or funk at this point.