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Zero94

Zero94

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Right I have been doing some reseatch on aging beer in oak barrels and was trying to find a way to do it faster and cheaper.
I can across a method which using small cubes of wood and a 24 hour heating then a 24 cooling cycle which is supposed to give the same result as '1 years worth of barrel aging' in a fraction the time.
Just wondering if anyone's heard of this or even tried it?
Cheers guys
 
Every so often someone comes along and asks about this (oak chip/oak aging) .
I havent heard about the heating and cooling techniques but you can get oak chips which are smaller than cubes so work faster (larger surface area, of course). I think I even read a forum post which stated a kit came with some oak powder and it only took a few weeks to work

You can oak chips them from a number of places but here's one

https://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Oak-Chips.html
 
I wonder if it would have aged enough by Christmas, I have been wanting to oak age a bit my Chinook Simcoe IPA for then.
 
I've read about the heating cooling trick on a distillation forum, to artificially age whisky, it's supposed to replicate the years it spends in the store in the barrel. (i.e hot in summer cool in winter).
I wouldn't think it would be suitable for beer.
 
I can't comment on the heating/cooling method, but oak chips don't take that long to do their thing from my experience. I added them to a porter and after only 3 weeks there was enough oak flavour for my taste.
 
I did an oak aged beer and used wine aging stick you can also use spirals they are specially cut in certain places to maximise surface area, work really well, especially as I soaked in rum first
 
This is a median roast French oak aging stick I bought. I infused for 5 days and was perfect

IMG-20171120-WA0023.jpg
 
Most info on barrel aging comes from commercial processes, using circa 200L barrels. The upside for homebrewers is that we do smaller volumes and therefore use smaller barrels, this increases the surface area to volume ratio, reducing the contact time. If you use oak chunks, you also get the advantage of the surface area of all 6 sides of a chunk and so can reduce that ratio and contact time further with enough chunks. Although you would need a considerable number.

Screenshot 2017-11-20 22.04.jpg
 

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