Brewers’ “set it and forget it” approach to barrel-aging beers is in the rearview. Today, the best practitioners of the art aim for ever-greater precision—even while acknowledging that total control is impossible.
This shift reflects wisdom won over time: In its modern commercial incarnation, barrel-aged beer is now about 30 years old. Three decades of beautiful successes (and undrinkable failures) have provided countless lessons on how to manipulate variables in the production of stout, barleywine, and other strong beers meant for the wood.
Yet no step is more critical than the first: designing and brewing the beer that’s bound for those barrels. Methods to produce it vary, but virtually every standout barrel-aged beer begins with intention.
“When we’re designing the recipe, we’re imagining where the beer is going later,” says Mike Lukacina, founder of Magnanimous Brewing in Tampa, Florida. “We design them for barrels.”
This approach accounts for the characteristics of specific barrels, how long the beer is likely to age, whether adjuncts will be added (and how much), the potential for blending, and more. It even includes a degree of consumer expectation: Are palates shifting to prefer slightly more roast? Or is this a “festival beer” best consumed in three-ounce pours?
Increasingly, brewers are answering these questions before they even brew a batch, let alone rack it into barrels.
Photo: Courtesy Half Acre
Building Barrel Components
Many breweries’ stouts or barleywines—even if destined for wood—can be consumed fresh, and they may be delicious that way. However, for brewers focused on producing beer for barrel-aging and blending, that’s often not the case.
At Chicago’s Revolution Brewing, barrel program manager Marty Scott says the barleywines and stouts that eventually become the Deth and Straightjacket series of beers would never be released before aging in the barrel.
“Because we do everything via blending now, we don’t have a standalone recipe that we put into the barrels, twiddle our thumbs, and then pull out,” Scott says. Today, Revolution brews its stouts and barleywines meant for barrels in two distinct recipes: “sweet” and “dry” versions. Customers won’t get a chance to drink these individual beers on their own; instead, they’re designed to interact with barrels in different ways, contributing varied aromas, flavors, textures, and alcohol levels to a final blend. Scott says he’s fortunate to have a library of up to 1,500 barrels from which to select, but he’s adamant that brewers don’t need volume to achieve barrel-aging success—they only need a plan.
“You don’t need an inventory of 1,500 barrels to take control back and to have a thoughtful blending regimen,” Scott says. “Once you have space for two batches of barrels, you can start playing around with these various components. The smaller the brewhouse size and the more room you have to store, the more opportunity it gives you to do this kind of component production and blending.”
In Lafayette, Colorado, Westbound & Down uses a related approach for its barrel-aged stouts. The bulk of the final blends comes from Absence, a classic, roast-forward imperial stout full of chocolate and coffee notes. Supplementing that beer are two components that the brewery doesn’t release commercially on their own. One, known internally as Cookie, is a 30°P (1.129) oatmeal imperial stout that adds massive brown sugar and baking flavors. The other is a lower-roast imperial stout of 35°P (1.154) that delivers huge sweetness and body. (The team referred to this one initially as Big Softy before switching its name to Abundance—together, the two names provide a solid overview of this beer’s characteristics.)
Those two components exist only to contribute to Westbound & Down’s final barrel-aged blends. Abundance, in particular, can absorb an intense level of oak sap—on par with Louie, the brewery’s English-style barleywine—without pushing the overall blend out of stout territory and into the realm of strong ales. On its own and without adjuncts, however, Abundance makes little sense.
“We basically make it as a jet-black barleywine,” says Jake Gardner, director of brewing operations. “It’s no longer barleywine because to get it jet black, you have to use enough dark malt that it’s [stylistically] in no-man’s-land.”
However, what may be confusing or disappointing on its own plays a pivotal role as a minor component in Westbound & Down’s anniversary beers, including 5 Years Strong—one of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®’s Best 20 Beers in 2021.
Photos, from Left: Courtesy Revolution; Courtesy River North
The Sugars Have It
It was a brewer’s mistake almost a decade ago that taught Revolution the power of component blending.
That brewer left a steam jacket on while mashing in, resulting in a wildly under-attenuated barleywine. Unblended, it was overly sweet, so the team brewed a deliberately dry batch to blend with it, allowing them to hit their target sugar and alcohol levels in the final beer.
After they aged both components in barrels for a year, the final blend was a success. Even more valuable, the remaining barrels of those sweet and dry components yielded a critical lesson after resting for another year: The aging process had acted differently on the two versions, producing marked changes in color, aroma, and texture in the sweet barleywine but relatively little change in the drier one.
Scott and his team connected the dots: It was the sugars within the beer that were most reactive to the aging process, not the liquid itself. (It’s a process Scott refers to as “dynamic aging.”) Over the years, that conclusion has guided Revolution’s blending process, which today generally involves a 60/40 or 50/50 blend of sweet to dry barleywine—with the sweeter one aged anywhere from 12 to 40-plus months, and the drier one for only six.
Though much of Revolution’s blended barleywines are made of young beer, the concentrated sugars in the sweeter component have essentially been “super aged,” resulting in a complex final mélange. “It winds up tasting like it’s a two- or three-year-old beer, but you could have 40 or 50 percent of that blend that’s only six months old,” Scott says. “We call it ‘barrel-stack optimization’—we can get a lot more liquid through the barrel stacks and have the same malt complexity value, or malt oxidative value. It ends up tasting really fucking old.”
The Westbound & Down team discovered the power of sugars in a related way: They were struck by how much more barrel character barleywines expressed compared to stouts. They figured that some of that had to do with barleywines’ higher gravity and higher sugar concentration, as they’re mostly made of Golden Promise or Maris Otter malts compared to stouts’ inclusion of roasted, dark, and caramel malts.
Again, Scott emphasizes that a brewery doesn’t need hundreds of barrels to try out this kind of blending—it needs only two. Blending also offers greater control and flexibility, he says, because brewers can use the components to adjust the blend for dryness and roast versus sweetness and viscosity—to their own taste, or that of their customers.
The more contrast between the two base recipes, Scott says, the greater the range of flavors and textures that are possible in the final blend.
Photos: Courtesy River North
Not Blended, But Intended
Most small breweries that produce barrel-aged beers aren’t blending components the way Revolution and Westbound & Down are. Many of the most successful ones, however, are adjusting their approaches to maximize a beer’s chance of success in the barrel, employing long boils, double mashes, and various sugars to beef up a beer bound for wood.
The Big Friendly in Oklahoma City adjusts its stout recipes and brewing processes depending on the target flavor profile after barrel-aging. If the goal is for the barrel to amplify caramel and vanilla notes, the brewers lean more heavily on debittered black malt as a portion of the grain bill. Or, if the brewers plan to use a flavor adjunct that they expect to marry seamlessly with roastier notes—such as coconut—they’ll bump the roasted barley up to half or even 60 percent of the stout’s specialty malts.
“It’s minor changes that make a big difference,” says Joe Quinlin, the brewery’s cofounder. The Big Friendly’s barrel program is small. With only five to seven barrels filled at a time, and with a recent shift to using only one adjunct at a time—if any—the team doesn’t have a lot of room for imperfections.
Success starts with a base beer engineered specifically for wood. “It’s been a move back to simplicity and focusing on building a beer’s flavor and how it can complement the barrel,” Quinlin says.
The malt bill is also a primary focus at River North in Denver. In recent years, head brewer Matt Malloy has cut out black patent and heavily roasted malts entirely; he found that years in a barrel tended to amplify their astringency. Instead, he’s using higher percentages of lighter-roasted malts to achieve the desired color and roast character. He’s also increased final mash temperatures to 154–156°F (68–69°C) to extract less-fermentable sugars, aiming for a more substantial base that can withstand some thinning over its year or two in a barrel.
Intentionality is also the guiding principle at Chicago’s Half Acre. That’s especially true of Benthic, the annual barrel-aged, coffee-coconut stout that makes up most of its barrel-aged production. Senior R&D manager Ryan O’Doherty says that Benthic’s consistency and quality have improved over the years, thanks to more precise control of hot-side processes.
“It’s making sure that we’re not just like, ‘Let’s see how this brew day goes, and if we’re at 35 or at 30°P, that’s fine.’ We started to care about being exactly 31.5 or 32°P,” or a gravity of 1.136–1.139,” O’Doherty says.
Across the board, Half Acre has become more thoughtful about what goes into barrels. For example, it nixed barrel-aging for coffee beers Big Hugs and Orin after they proved to be too thin to stand up to oxidation in the barrel. “On the hot side, don’t just think of it as rushing to get this thing in barrels,” O’Doherty says. “Look at your roasted-malt percentages. Use some oats for body. Every step of the way does matter.”
Another lesson Half Acre learned: Ask for help. When struggling with Big Hugs and Orin, brewers called Phil Wymore, cofounder and brewmaster at Perennial Artisan Ales in St. Louis. Wymore suggested bulking up the malt bill on beers meant for barrels.
Likewise, problem-solving and collaboration have been critical at Magnanimous, which released its first barrel-aged beer for its one-year anniversary in 2021.
Photo: Courtesy Half Acre
Today, Magnanimous has about 50 bourbon barrels filled with beers of various ages. Lukacina describes their brewhouse as “inefficient,” meaning the team is always hoping to pick up new techniques for cramming more malt and sugar into the mash tun. (They’ve tried overnight boils and double mashes, but they most frequently use products such as brewer’s crystals and liquid malt extract to increase starting gravity.)
Barrel-aged collaborations with California’s Bottle Logic and Virginia’s Commonwealth have proven invaluable.
“When we’re producing these beers and having issues on the hot side, knowing what someone else did in that situation helps a lot,” Lukacina says. “The most valuable thing about doing collabs is the information you get from the person you’re working with, whether process, recipe formulation, or just somebody to bounce creative ideas off.”
Increasingly, these lessons aren’t only about barrel selection or maintenance, or how many pounds of hazelnuts to use per barrel. Building a successful barrel-aged barleywine or stout starts long before the liquid touches wood, with some of the most critical moments in a barrel-aged beer’s life happening before anyone pitches yeast.