How To Age A Whisky Mini Barrel

hello everybody and welcome to the whisky dictionary where I do the research I teach you a little something about what you're drinking today I wanted to talk to you about mini barrels and I got this for Christmas this year as you can see all my Christmas decorations are still up it's actually the day after Christmas when I started filming this and the reason for that is that this is a one to three day process so if you got one of these for Christmas as well you might want to start now but I'm going to show you what to do with this so you've got your barrel it comes with this cool little stand here and I'm gonna do my best to cover this up so it's got my name on it but you have some wood burning there in my case it tells me you know barrel aged whiskey it says my hometown and that says what year I was turned 21 now you may have just noticed that some of these o-rings here are a little loose the reason for that is that you need to cure this barrel and by cure that means pretty much like so good with water but on the inside and the reason for that is that these barrels are built to expand so what you're gonna see over the next one to three days is this thing leaking a whole lot of water so give some thought to where you might want to store this while you're kind of going through these steps in order to kind of not have it leak all over the place you know people said bathtubs or sinks maybe that's not a good option for you I'm probably just gonna use like a cookie sheet with some aluminum foil because it actually said that some stuff will come out of this and it might stain so I'm probably just gonna do that cookie sheet with some aluminum foil either way the first step is to take your spigot now the spigot is pretty nice you know in this case it's made out of wood it does turn pretty easily a little squeaky I suspect that might get a little bit better with some of the liquid running through there but what you're gonna want to do is take your spinning spigot and there's a little hole there put it in the hole but only push it as hard as you can do without having to use a tool you're mostly just going for a seal here so in my case that is still not very good it's definitely a little tight for me alright so let's see there we go alright so that's pretty good and I suspect that as this gets wet and it swells a bit this might actually be a little easier to further alright so it also comes with this little guy and this is a cork for the bunghole here that doesn't need to go in there yet and actually you probably can't even fit it in there so the next step is to fill this with water alright so as you can see this water is pretty hot I am not about to try to talk through the process of filling this thing up because I'm not nearly that entertaining to talk to you for a minute and a half about nothing well it's hotter so I'm gonna speed through this but just try to get the whole thing completely filled with hot hot water [Applause] alright so as you can see it is leaking a bit and it will so what you're gonna want to do is place that on here as promised here's my cookie sheet so he also may have noticed that my spigot was completely turned on so make sure that is shut make sure that this thing is full it's going to leak for a little bit and just check on it every like 20 minutes or so during the first bit and make sure to adjust these rings as well so that it is as tight as it can go in my case there were grooves where they should have been and even the instructions say that during shipping a lot of times they'll move so yeah those are pretty pretty firmly on there and actually it's already not leaking as much as it was originally so I'm gonna probably end up filling this up a couple of times but overall I'm gonna probably just check back with you in a couple of days maybe one maybe two depending on the leak in but what you're gonna want to do is refill this pretty much always keep it full and then when it doesn't leak any more that's when we're gonna go on to the next step which is probably the next thing that you'll see so I'll see you in a couple of days all right so it's been two days and one thing I forgot to mention in the previous video is that you need to put the bung in the bung hole while you are letting this sit for a couple of days so the next step is basically to take this out and to dump it and you're going to know that you probably won't come across on the video the color is not very clean now I'm sure that the water is probably making my audio a little muffled so I'm just going to be quiet while this thing drains I'm gonna speed up the video and I'll talk to you again as soon as the temperature all right so about halfway through you may have noticed that it dramatically increased in speed open up the spigot while you are pouring duh and it will go a lot faster so the next step is to fill this once again with very hot water I'm about halfway through and then you want to swish it around so I'm gonna speed up the video again all right so you want to kind of switch it around actually you're getting all that stuff that may be in there out I find letting the spigot run a little bit is good then you want to continue to do this over and over again until the water that comes out of it it's clear alright so now that that is empty we want to make sure we're closing our spigot again and you're gonna want to fill this up with whatever whiskey you'd like to use now for me I am going to take some of that Booker's that I keep talking about that's not very good the set 20 1701 I'm gonna see if I can mellow it out a little bit in this barrel so I'm not going to make you sit through me pouring that but I will cut to or I'll speed this up while I'm pouring it in I am however going to keep a little bit in the bottle and then transfer it over to another container so I can compare them now there isn't a ton left in here so this is kind of going to be a little bit of an experiment so let me try [Applause] I changed my mind I'm gonna just pour the whole thing in there cuz it's not very not very full I'd actually really hoped that was gonna fill it up a little bit more than it did but oh well it's gonna be about half full right now and I'm gonna just age that for you no I I remember enough what this tastes like to know whether it aged properly or not a male at this age probably about two months and then I will probably do a review on it during one of my live streams one thing to note as well while you are doing this is that every now and then you're going to want to turn the barrel and turn it again and turn it again make sure that that bung is in there really really tight and this allows the top to get wet and it will stop your barrel from leaking so if you notice that your barrel is leaking you're going to want to make sure you turn it so that does it and make sure to check back with me in a couple of months I'm Cheryl I'll announce it properly on my channel so if you have one of these yourself I hope it goes really well for you and I hope whatever you put in there comes out better so thanks for joining me here on the whisky dictionary have a good night [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Whiskey Dictionary

Views: 96,098

Keywords: Whiskey, Whisky, Review, Information, Mini Cask, Mini Barrel, Mini Keg, thewhiskeydic, barrel, liquor aging, bourbon, oak barrel, scotch, oak barrels, barrel aging, how to age your own whisky, aging barrel, the whiskey dic, booker's, bookers

Id: ScBd2WM8Ci8

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018