Beer Forum

Trying to think through the best way to mimic a used wine barrel with cubes.

problem 1) The oak in a wine barrel would have given up a good portion of it's "oakiness" to the 60 gallons of wine that had been inside it. I'm thinking that a series of boiling then dumping the liquid will help me reduce the oak flavor (plus sanitize and remove any O2 that might be trapped in the pores).

problem 2) How to get the wine flavor imparted by the barrel. There seems to be two options here 1 - soak the cubes in wine. 2 - add a dose of wine directly. Of the two I think the second lends itself to better control. I also think that if 1 - is done it would be tough to prevent the wine from becoming stale even if I did this in a corny under pressure, the whole process would seem easy to mess up... therefore if I do go with the second option the question is - how much... I haven't been able to find any info on how much wine a beer can extract from a barrel.

Any thoughts?

I would do small bench top trials to see how much wine flavor you want then scale up and add accordingly. When a wine barrel is emptied it is usually rinsed out really well, so i don't think there would be a lot, if any actual wine coming over into the beer. I would do the soaked oak cubes in wine over the straight adding, but it depends on what flavors you are going for from the process. If you want wine flavor add wine, if you want just a hint of wine then soak the cubes. The wine will go stale the same way beers does, so I wouldn't worry about that, just keep it away from oxygen and you will be fine.

Hope this helps

You are correct in that several boils and draining of the subsequent "oaky" liquid will help to sanitize the cubes as well as decrease the amount of tannins and fresh oak flavor/aroma that goes into your beer. I would think that a few rounds of 30 sec. boils would be fine for this. Smell, taste, and observe the color of the "oak water" you are dumping until you think you are in the right ballpark for what you are looking for.

Regarding the wine flavor contribution I can only speak from my experience. In one of my last sours I used about 1.35 oz of boiled oak cubes (french oak med toast) and soaked them in a fair amount of chardonnay for about 6 wks. I did not worry about the wine going stale as I was only adding the oak cubes. I then added the soaked oak cubes into the beer in secondary for aging. Since I was also looking for a fairly large contribution from the wine as well, I blended just about 1 full (750 mL) bottle of chardonnay in with the beer upon racking. I just took a taste after about 4 mos and the wine is there but not over the top.

Boiling the cubes in wine?