How Much Wood Should I Use When Aging Spirits At Home?

Howl's and get on everyone I hope you're having a kick-ass week today I'm here to talk to you about wood aging spirits how much of it to use and a few little tips to help you get a more reliable result they're gonna be more welcome to still everyone I'm Jesse in and this is the channel all about chasing the craft of home distillation and making it a legitimate hobby today we're doing stuff about aging spirits but we do everything from you know random sort of theoretical things through the whole practical process and so on and so forth so if you learn to craft spirits if you just like tasting them make sure you hit the subscribe button down below bring the notification belt and you won't miss anything alright guys so I've been getting a bunch of questions lately around wood how do you use it the process that I use how I decide how much to use and how long I do it for so I figured I'd do a wee video on that today now that's what I want to focus on where I'm not specifically going to be talking about is the type of wood you should be using so should we be using French oak or American why do you use e trial or not trying to toast it all those other things so if you want more information on the type of wood to use I'll put a link up top in a link in the description down below to a couple of videos on that if you want to know how to prepare the wood so you know perhaps you're looking at tasting something or charring something I will put links for that than the cards and the description as well be short but definitely not simple answer is yes that's how much wood you should use and that's how long you should do it for and what I mean by that is by the post things are almost endlessly variable in terms of what you might want to do and why you might want to do it so what I want to do is give you a few examples these are the three sort of extremities I guess for what I've been doing for three different reasons so let's talk about those alright so the first one that I want to talk about is what I've been calling a forced age and a thinking about their business I use about 500 bills of spirits and I use about that much wood so there's about 8 centimeters by 1 centimeter by two centimeters that's roughly the amount of wood that I'm using for five hundred mils to force eight when I say force aging I am using temperature cycling so I was initially using the microwave which I actually think is slightly more effective but I've gone away from that to using just hot water just because it's that's easier I can guess there's an argument to be made that it's safer I can walk away from it I just give it a giant hug big potable hot water fill it up with really hot water drop this into it forget about it for a couple of hours pop it in the freezer rinse and repeat now the reason I do that is to extract a whole lot of wood flavor and sugar really really quickly so I'm using a relatively really big piece of wood for a very small amount of liquid so once again that's this sized piece of wood for about five hundred mils and I'll leave that in there for it's not me about three to four days of active cycling and then about another four to five days I'm just letting it chill with the wood in there and at about that point that's when it starts to really really sort of I don't want to use the word saturate because that must leads but for me at that point it started to extract it out all the came from the wood before it starts turning the corner and going pretty horrible and what I mean by there is that you'll notice for all of these things so they'll get to a point we have some of your starting to pull a whole lot more undesirable flavors so you're starting to pull sort of business and tenon out and I actually like a little bit of bitterness and tannin but but I guess the point was just too much obviously though so hmm so this is really not ageing the spirit at all it's just cranking a whole lot of wood flavor into it it's infusing it with okay if you're using oak or any rather wood you're using it's not ageing it yeah the reason I do it is because I find it a lot easier to imagine what a spirits going to be like in six months or a year if I do this to it first yeah that gives me an analogue for what I could expect in the future so maybe I will take two of these do one with you know it's a 220 degree tasted for four hours piece of wood you know something that looks kind of like this and the other is war oak that's been charred I'll do them next to each other and kind of see which way I think is more the direction I think will work for that specific spirit yeah so this one this is actually the Rye which wasn't the video for the right is very much like a raw the wood for that one is very much like a raw saw dusty oak flavor and then also paired with kind of like a vanilla caramel kind of thing going on which I think personally I think works really well with the right sort of spicy flavors on this and I starting to get just a little bit of tannin in it as well which once again works it all plays together so you've got the the oak and the vanilla and the sugar sort of contrasting the Rye flavors and then you've got the the the tenon and the woods spiced coming in and punching up the right flavors as well and because that works pretty close to what I want I decided to use exactly the same oak for a medium length ageing which is this one here all right so this is two litres of spirit the total volume I'm using for two litres there's about this big so that's about 10 seem to be this by two centimetres by two and a half centimeters substantially more than this but remember this is 500 Mills and this is actually a little over two liters yeah so in terms of the actual volume of wood that's in it that's probably close to a half of that and the reason I'm doing that is I'm not going to use it with temperature fluctuation and the reason I'm doing there is I want to age this for about five months about six months and have it really somewhere around Christmas in the summertime for us here in New Zealand so December through February somewhere around there is what I'm aiming for for that so I know that's going to take a significantly longer time there's a whole lot less wood and I'm also not temperature cycling it yeah so it's not gonna pull those flavors out as fast it's not gonna break the wood down as quickly and essentially pull it into solution so for me for that sort of time period sort of three to six months this I'm using that slice piece of wood and the reason I'm aiming for that time period is in my experience this is all just my experience if you pull a whole lot of flavor out of the wood and let it sit for 3-4 months not a whole lot changes that's that's pretty much it however however when you get to right around six months something starts to change you get a new level of complexity and you start to stack the age factor into it now it's very very very young for actual aging but I'm just saying that's when it starts to show up for me it adds another layer of complexity another layer of there's just more coming out of it the really so this is like a pretty maybe like a two or three dimensional flavor from the oak coming up this starts to turning into maybe four or five layers of sort of flavor and nuance from the the wood that's going into the spur compared to the Weisberg would be yep all right so we move from there over to thus this is the bastard whiskey the first aged spirit I ever made is coming up two years in October so it's starting to get a little bit of a jar here sorry just to refresh you guys five hundred mils with a piece of wood this big two litres with a piece of wood this big and this is moving on ting there it was originally three litres which is right around here so it's maybe maybe two and a half litres now and that's how much wood has been enough for a long time that's all so why use a whole lot less wood over a longer period time and the reason is that I'm trying to go for this but more essentially so I'm trying to get the same amount of would influence as this the same amount of would influence I wanted this the same kind of color the same amount of sweetness the same amount of oakiness the same amount of all of the flavors coming out of this tannins everything what the same amount in here but what I want to happen is for that to happen over a really long time it's only all the chemicals that are coming out of the wood interacting the spirit doing the magic I'm not even gonna proteins to understand what's going on but I am convinced that those things that come out of the wood and go into the spirit they're more over time they react with I don't know one of those they react with the oxygen they react with the spirit themselves the spirit breaks them down into smaller parts I have a hunch that's probably of those from some reading I've done that's all this is about when I get a whole lot more research done I'll make a video on that as well so the idea is here that I'm trying to introduce that time factor right now for those of you who would have been around forever authorized I'm gonna go back and watch the the bastard whisky he besides the bicycle whiskey videos you'll know that when that first went into this bottle and significantly more oak in there than I do now so that's something I want to talk about now as well just because you put something into a spirit doesn't mean you're locked in cool I put oak in this I put significantly more than that in there and I was in there for about two months I got some feedback from people that I really appreciated you know the knowledge and I also started tasting it and I could taste that it was hidden in a direction there wasn't what I wanted so what you know 90% of the wood out there and it was left with us I had probably actually that much you know that much I need to start with poor memory the interesting thing is that it stalled right out and since the extraction from the wood and it's actually turned into a bit of a technique that I am playing with them using a lot a little asset at the moment and the general idea is basically to cram the spirit full of a hole in a wood flavor get it to the point where it's actually starting to get a ball iron to tannic too spicy for you the Banjara Jaggi harsh flavors that come out of the wood and then whip a whole lot of the wood out leaving a tiny bit in there and just let it chill for a while and I've been noticing that if you do that those bitter tannic Jaggi spicy peppery notes will fade in time and that's exactly what happened with this stuff here yeah I think that's got a ways to go yet I would like to get that I said when I made it that I was gonna get it to two years now I'm thinking I want to keep it going any longer all right guys so I hope that makes sense and I hope that kind of illustrates what I'm doing with my oak or other woods and the volumes that I'm using the last thing I want to talk about is the ABV of the spirits that the wood is sitting in for us or that the you know though is something in the barrel if you're using barrels so this is something that I learned from the distillers in Austin when I was there and I'd heard the reference to it but I hadn't heard it explained quite the way they put it to me so let me see if I can relay that on to you so the simplest version of this idea and it is simple guys because it's a whole lot more complex than what I'm about to describe you but this is the the reduced version of it if they make sense they kind of thumb this fits most of the time so in right around 55 56 percent ABV there's kind of a tipping point of the entry level spirit ABV above 55 56 degrees so anywhere from 50 Simmons that I have to about a little over 60% that side of things is the spicy the 10 ik the Jaggi jari intense flavors that come out of the wood on the lower side of that below 55 degrees Jesus Christ they keep saying degrees below 55% ABV so sort of 50 to 55% ABV that's the area where you're pulling more of the sweet comfortable friendly flavors over wood the vanilla the sweetness the syrup enos all of those things that that are the things that are mellowing and smoothing and a whiskey I up until that trip had been doing everything on the high end so 62% let me see what's on this yeah so this is 60% and it went really really peppery for a while they're they're really done it's still sitting at whatever it is I haven't water that down but that that's so where it is and because of that I was getting a lot of my spirits hitting towards that means they were aggressive they were full of spice and pepper and a little bit 10 ik which is great I actually like that like I see it but now that I've got that any state of knowledge I can teach some experiments so this for example was for people but I think from memory and this I'm training it with you one of course you can split a batch and play with any of these variables um you know 2 3 4 different versions of the same thing and then blend it back together as you wish alright guys so I hope that kind of demystifies it for you a little bit I hope that that shows you that there is there's no right answer to this it's a series of decisions that tweak knobs or dials or C stores or whatever you want to call it in a certain direction there's not a magical formula that just makes it beautiful for two reasons one if it was everyone would be freakin doing it and it would be easy to make great spirits and the great spirits wouldn't be great spirits they'd just be completely mediocre spirits and the second is that because your taste is completely different or potentially completely different to hold on other people's tastes and flex reason you're just going to have to experiment and find out what really works for you which is freaking awesome for two reasons one you get to have the fun the joy the beauty of exploring that and second is that that's the coolest thing about the craft in my mind is that we get to make what we want the way we want to and drink the spirits that we like to drink and constantly strive to improve on them that's beautiful there really is alright guys so there you have it the two ends of the spectrum and something right down the middle for what I've been doing recently if you're doing things differently I'd love to hear from you if you're using barrels especially small barrels I would love to hear what you're up to I need to give it a try sometime especially if you're trying to make those barrels last longer and do something you know more on this time scale all right guys that's it for me this week if you liked the video make sure you give it a thumbs up if you really like to end you're not subscribed yet make sure you do so now she has video around will any of your friends that you think might like it and I'll catch you next time guys keep on chasing the craft you

Channel: Still It

Views: 138,162

Keywords: Wood ageing, ageing home made spirits, aging whisky with wood, aging whiskey with wood, Ageing bourbon with wood, ageing rum with wood, wood, US White oak, Oak, barrel, how to age spirits with wood, ageing spirits with wood, how much wood to use, how long to age for, how long, use more wood with spirits, home distilling, Jesse, Still it, chase the craft, moonshine, age moonshine with wood, flavour with wood, colour

Id: 8ZOIrGfee7Y

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 04 2019