We’ve got more than 1,000 oak barrels in our inventory, each holding one of a handful of base beers. Sometimes, some of the barrels wind up leaking. It’s a micro-biohazard for the rest of the barrels on the stack. And it can breed fruit flies, make a mess, smell bad, and cause general growth of things we don’t want. Because these are in our taproom, it becomes time-consuming to keep cleaning up after them. So rather than spend my time cleaning up after them or considering them a loss, we decided to make some cool one-off beers. It’s a barrel-rescue program that internally we call the Sanctuary Barrel Program.
First, I moved the leaking barrels into the brewery, and we ordered some nice fresh barrels from our supplier and started racking them—soft plumbing the good beer from the leaky barrels to the new ones. But what with absorption, evaporation, and leaking, we didn’t have enough to fill a complete barrel during transfer; we’d have headspace. So we paired base beers that were similar.
We tried to match from the same batch, but sometimes that didn’t work, and sometimes we had to blend different styles of beer. When we had a new full barrel, we documented where the blend came from, the proportions, and all the pertinent information. When all was said and done with the first rescue barrels, we wound up with twenty-five totally unique double bourbon barrel–aged beers.