Barrels with Epic Beer in them

[nzbrewer]

I thought I would do a quick post here to answer some questions about what I am doing with the barrels in the brewery. So some stats


I purchased 12 x American Oak, Medium Toast barrels (225 litres each)

They were first filled on 19th February 2010 with some Epic Armageddon IPA

Today 19th April 2010 they were emptied back into a unitank and will be chilled down before filtering and bottling next week.

So IPA was on the wood for 2 months

Today we rinsed and then refilled the barrels with Epic Thornbridge Stout (ETS) only half the batch will go into wood.

The ETS will be in barrels for the next 3 or so months (after two months of cold conditioning, first). It is intended that this beer will be bottled and released just prior to BrewNZ/Beervana in August.

There are also now a couple of experimental barrels.

1. A barrel that was only half full of Armageddon IPA at the end of the tank, was topped off (so a blend) with Cock & Bull Dark Star. Will see how this develops over the coming months. Might do some bottle condition trials with this beer.

2. A barrel of the Armageddon IPA, which was next to the boiler, which had some issues with carbonation and pressure and blew its bung a couple of times, seemed to have an interesting growth(?) on top of the beer when inspected today. We didn't use this beer, even though it tasted OK. I plan on keeping it to see how it develops over the coming months. It might become funky, who knows. I intend to not do anything with it for 666 days, which brings it to the date 21 December 2012.

[Reviled]

Awesome!! When will this oaked IPA be available either on tap or in bottles???

[nzbrewer]

May sometime, has been a bit of delay on the label design (i was out of the country for nearly three weeks)

[Reviled]

So youre definately planning it for bottles then? Thats pretty cool! No doubt stock will be somewhat limited tho...

[MrC]

Oustanding Luke!!! I'm salivating just looking at the barrels.

[nzbrewer]

yeah stock will be limited