“Barrels are tough. They’re overly time- and labor-intensive,” says Los Angeles Ale Works (LAAW) Cofounder Kristofor Barnes as he walks among a dozen used wine barrels that fill the empty floor space of his new brewery in Hawthorne, California. Half will be filled with beer for the first time later in the afternoon; the other six have just been emptied and now await the fresh wort that’s finishing a spin in the brewhouse whirlpool. These barrels—four chardonnay barrels, a syrah barrel, and a pinot noir barrel—are part of an interconnected system inspired by the Burton union fermentation system (a fermentation system of interconnected wood barrels that was used predominately by the brewers in and around Burton-on-Trent, England, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century).
Developed to jump-start the brewery’s sour-beer program, the LAAW Blüme Union (named for the Berliner weisse they produce from it) uses a series of manifolds and vinyl hoses to connect each barrel in the three-level tower to a sealed blow-off collection vessel. The barrels are inoculated with a strain of Lactobacillus along with German ale yeast, and the system can ferment the wheat-heavy wort into a briskly tart Berliner weisse in short order.
“The wort goes in the barrel on Saturday, and the beer will be sour by Wednesday,” says LAAW Barrel Director Brian Holter. He says Blüme takes about a month of residency in the union to hit flavor maturity, so while it’s a slower process than the “short cut” of kettle souring, it’s quick for an all oak–fermented beer.