Barrel fermentation

[Anthony]

For months now I've been looking at a recooped 10 gallon barrel, at first I was thinking about a barrel strickly for aging, but I've started wondering about barrel fermentation of mead.

Has anyone done this and what might I want to consider before investing in an oak barrel?

Anthony

[Aspera]

Mead is about the only thing that I would ferment/age in a barrel, unless it was lined with beeswax/hot pitch. I understand that mead benefits from the wood tannins and the lye/sulfer used to sanitize the barrel. In his meadmaking book, Morse describes the use of mead barrels at Buckfast Abby.

[nursebee]

Have you tried a small batch first using oak chips to see if you like it?

Lehman's in OH has some. Also the homebrew supply houses.

[Aspera]

Another good alternative (my first choice) is to boil a 1-3 teaspoons of toasted oak chips in a cup of water, and add some of this oak extract to the beverage in question. Some winemakers recommended "oak more" oak granules to me. It doesn't have quite the romance of a used brandy cask though.

[Anthony]

Hey Joe, Aspera,

I've tried chip's and cube's, the results are oaky, haven't tried powdered oak though.

I've had wine and some mead of others that have been oaked with cube's, chip's and those which had been barrle fermented. I can't tell between those aged in oak and those oaked with chip's or cube's myself.

Advice I got from an other forum suggest that a 10 gal. barrel would be good for fermenting so long as the mead was aged in glass. It's said that smaller barrel's lend the oak flavor to the beer/mead/wine faster due to a larger percent of the mead being in contact with the wood.

I've worked out a few recipe's that turn out well time after time. My primary interest in barrel fermenting and aging is a desire to step up 3 - 6 gallon batches of mead to 10 or more gallons at a time and bulk age for at least a year using yeast like Lalvin EC-1118 & D47 which are used widely for sur lie aging.

A 27 Gallon stainless conical fermenter cost about $700.00 where as a ReCoop 30 gallon oak Barrel cost $295.00 including shiping.

Either can be used to ferment and age for well over a year, but using a barrel imparts the flavor and character of oak to the mead and cost half as much.

Anthony

[buz]

I tried to make apple jack--hard cider in a barrel once used for home winemaking. It was a good year for apples--and honey, so filling the fifty gallon barrel was doable. I had a really big bubbler in the bung.
That was the year we had all the trouble getting a president...I was waiting to bottle....I got fifty gallons of Presidential AppleCider VINEGAR.
Truth is, I got the barrel from the winemaker's widow. His last batch might have gone too. Once the vinegar yeast is in the wood--well.
But good luck with your efforts.

[Anthony]

Hey Buz,

Acetobacter aceti, the bacterium which converts alcohol and some sugars into vinegar is easily managed with most sanitization technique's.

I make vinegar as well as beer,mead and wine, as of yet there has been no problem with any of it.

A recooped barrel has been sanitized, scraped, refitted then chard, any live bacterium which may have been in the barrel would surely be eliminated by the end of this process.

As to using barrel's which are had second hand without going through recooping, I don;t know that I would trust them for use for anything other then aging vinegar.

Anthony

[Aspera]

My primary interest in barrel fermenting and aging is a desire to step up 3 - 6 gallon batches of mead to 10 or more gallons at a time and bulk age for at least a year using yeast like Lalvin EC-1118 & D47 which are used widely for sur lie aging.

I really like the Wyeast Sweet mead for sur lie aging. D47, and 1118+Montrochet are also good choices. That sweet mead does age well and gives a nice citrus twang that goes with oak. Its not at all sweet though if you give it time to cask condition. Somebody on the web posted something like "the great mead experiment". These intrepid mazers gave some really helpful descriptions of mead fermentation in glass with added yeast nutrients, and put it in pdf format. Here's the kicker: The sweet mead had the highest alchohol tolerance in spite of its rather sluggish fermetations.

[JohnBeeMan]

So, how does one sanitize an oak barrel using lye/sulfur?

I have a 55 gallon barrel that I was thinking about using. I thought the only way to sanitize was 'burn' the inside. The barrel is currently unassembled but is from new stays from a barrel cooper.

I also need to jump from 5 gallon batches to a 55 gallon batch if I try this!!!

[Aspera]

The charring is mostly to flavor and remove toxins from distilled spirits. Wine barrels are traditionally cleaned with a solution of soda ash and lye, and then treated by burning sulfer inside of them to make SO2. Fire was also once used to help bend the wet stays to the correct fit. The modernized version of this is a product called Barrel Kleen(sp?) and metasulfites. Beer barrels were lined with boiling pitch and/or beeswax to sanitize and water proof them as sulfites usually are not strong enough for beer. Beer aged in wooden barrels is now nearly impossible to get (unfortunately)

[Aspera]

BTW the character and degree of oakiness is determined by the type of oak. For rapid aging and heavy oak flavors, French oak is traditional. Tight-grained Arkansan oak is better for extended aging without much concentration/evaporation. Hungarian oak is in between and said to be vanilla like in its flavoring. Some barrels are hybrids (American staves with French ends, etc). Used spirit barrels often taste like the given spirit (such as whiskey).