using and re charring barrels

welcome to barley and hops my name is George and today we're going to talk about barrels and their use we use barrels for wines or for spirits primarily for spirits and that's what we get the most interest in because it does such a wonderful job of maturing and flavoring a neutral spirit that you place in in your barrels so today we've got a couple of different examples I've got a 2-liter barrel a 3-liter barrel the five liter barrel and a 10 liter barrel and I'm going to explain to you a little bit about these and also the differences and then we're going to get into some other aspects about using barrels for maturing spirits there are some options as opposed to using the barrels you can use the wood chips I have dark oak chips medium toasted oak chips and light toasted oak chips and the differences between these three are as far and wide as you can range a lot it has to do with personality flavor profiles you're looking for the hues the development of the darkness how dark you're looking to get your your spirits and of course time of course the darker oak chips will turn your spirits a little darker with a little bit more oak in a shorter period of time but you're not going to gather as much of the flavors and pull the tin in in the vanilla out of the out of the wood as easily a medium put you in about the medium range and of course with the lighter oak chips you'll get a little bit more of those paintings a little bit more of those vanilla pnes and also it takes just a little bit longer to color but it'll be a lighter hue so i offer that to you just as an option but if you want to go that option and you want to have the rustic barrel that's the conversation piece that sits on the mantle these are things are excellent and you can reuse them over and over again it will get to that but I want to caution you about the 2-liter barrel does not hold two litres there's a lot of discussion about why it doesn't hold two litres it's about 1.8 liters or a little bit less and the same thing with a 3 to 5 and the 10 some discussion is and the best one that I can offer you is someone told me this and I've done a lot of research someone told me that they said well these barrels are measured in how much they displace so this would displace two liters but it doesn't necessarily hold two liters I'm like okay but we give it the name as a two litre barrel of course I can't verify that but it sounds almost plausible it sounds like the best excuse I can come up with all the research that I've done is that there are so many different measurement units and you you could use if it's a barrel for wine it's one thing if it's a barrel for sherry it's something else it's a barrel for wine its measured in another if it's a barrel that's measured in Canada its measured in one way if it's in the UK orbit City so there are so many different measurements just suffice it to say that if you ask for a 2-liter barrel you could get one that looks like this these things are these things are amazing because you can place your spirits in here once when they come to you that these things will leak because there's no glue so you'll place them in a bucket or place them on their stand fill them with hot water let them sit overnight and they'll swell and that will seal the barrel itself and then once you seal the barrel you just open the top you don't pout all the water and then you add your spirits to it you let this set now here's the maturation time we do know that the smaller the barrel the shorter the maturation time and then when you get to a larger barrel it's a little bit longer the larger longer and the larger of course a lot longer and the average is about two to three weeks in the 2-liter maybe four to five weeks in the 3-liter you're getting about six or seven weeks out of the five liter and a good three months or more out of the out of the ten liter another good gauge is the maturation time in this barrel and this barrel are about equal but it's all based on how much surface area of your Spirit is in contact with inside the barrels that are already pre charred to medium toast so the maturation time here is equal to about five to six years in a large barrel so what we're doing is we're just sorting the range of time it takes to mature the spirit but we're doing it in a smaller barrel so the time shortens drastically as opposed to a larger barrel or if you've got 100 liters or more it takes years in order to do that because more of the product is in contact with the surface area inside the de barro now these things are like I said amazing if you order one of these and there are several several websites out there I'd say shop around and find one that you that really turns you on and they'll range in price from what I've stated here starting with about thirty bucks this one can range as high as 115 depends if you want to spend that spend it but there are some unscrupulous dealers out there that'll sell these to you for that price if you'll pay it but I'll tell you there they're not worth that much they're really a great centerpiece they really do a great job of maturing spirits they they caused a lot of questions in the house and they're really neat to have but they're really not worth hundred fifteen dollars I would offer to you that if you order one always order one that you have the option to have varnished these are the examples and I'm not sure if you can tell the difference here but this one is not varnished this is just a straight cave barrel and this one has a slight sheen to it and if you get one like this I always and it usually doesn't cost anything extra just tell me I want it varnished if you give you the option you have our Nishtha thing because they'll last a lot longer that way and they won't look like this one which has been used and you'll see that it's starting to bleach and leech all over the place you see that blackness it really does give it a good antique look but if you're not looking for that antique look make sure you get one that's varnished now I'm going to set these aside real quick here because I'm going to show you I have one here that we keep in the store and I've got my spirits in here and I use just a regular sugar wash I got it I even had a laser edge that was pretty neat costing about thirty bucks but I've got one here that I've got some spirits in and I've had it in here now for all probably about six weeks so which well within it is it's matured and it's ready for for consumption it was probably ready for consumption at the very beginning he put we leave it set in here and I leave this setting on the counter behind the store so if somebody wants to take a sample they're more than welcome to but I want to show you what it produces this went in here it was absolute crystal clear like anything that would come out of your still and that's the finished product and I achieve that and probably about the first three and a half four weeks but I've allowed it to sit in the barrel where it just stays there so now I've got to now I got to figure out what to do with this what we'll leave that for another time I just want to give you an idea and this is the one I've got this one this is a this has been varnished and I've used this several times once you use it my average has been about six Phil's before the barrel neutralizes so let's talk about neutralization of the barrel once everything is extracted or leached out of the wood and primarily you use white oak American white oak versus French white oak and French white oak is just as good it's just a little bit more subtle than the American white oak but once you've leased everything out of the barrel the barrel becomes almost useless but it's a great storage container now some people will ascribe to reach are in the barrel and we'll show you how to do that in a moment but you're not wasting your time by recharging the barrel but what you'll never have is you'll never get the tannin and the vanillin that are in the wood naturally that you leach out once they're gone they're gone but there are things that you can do now we'll set this aside and you'll notice that this is one of the barrels and I told you that we've used this several times and what we're going to do is I'm going to show you real quickly how you can reach our the barrel if you like to now reach our inner barrel does have a benefit of course it has a benefit for clarifying and filtering I'd always recommend that you filter your spirit before you put it in the barrel this will also make the barrel last a lot longer so without further ado let's do this let's take this apart it's just more than just a bung in the top and you've twist that this comes out this is the spout that was on the front and that leaves you with the barrel with all the rings now when you're using a larger barrel up it's really a two-man job because it's a whole lot easier to get four hands to hold these stave together remember these are not glued so they're all stuck together and then these bands hold everything in place and then when you put the hot water in here and allow it to set overnight it swells and it'll tighten up with these bands and that's what causes it to seal so there are no glues so just remember when you start to take this apart it's going to want to fall apart on you so the first thing we're going to do is a the items you're going to need are a little hammer a screwdriver a roll of tape and of course you're going to need something to burn with what I'm the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put a piece of this black I'm just using black electrical tape because it's just so useful it's so easy to use we're going to pull off that bottom stave and this one's off the bottom because the spout is on this end so we're going to get this one off and these after the barrel there it goes after your barrel dries it'll start to constrict so these rings will become fairly loose they may even fall off on their own just be careful so we're going to run a piece of tape we're going to run it this way we run a piece of tape around here the only thing that this is going to do is ensure that the bottom of this barrel doesn't pop apart because once it pops apart you're going to have a challenge getting it back together even with four hands okay so even then you want to try to pop off these other rings there we go excuse me that's the second ring and then we're going to pop off this ring and the reason want to pop this ring office because we want to be able to there it is we want to be able to separate those staves now once I've taken off that larger bring from the bottom I'm going to put that middle ring back on and the reason we put that middle ring back on is because I don't want those stays to go anywhere so that makes it easy now that leaves me with the top ring on the front the center ring on the front and the larger ring here we go let's get this thing popped off some of these will pop off real easy some of them will be challenging you may have to use a hammer to beat it off but usually they'll just pop right off now once you get it to this point understand this barrel is very very delicate now and you see you'll start to pull these staves away it puts your finger in the hole because it's getting ready to fall out and the end of this barrel is going to come out see this is why it takes it usually takes four hands I've done this a couple times and I'm trying to be careful so I don't lose anything I kind of know what to expect and in a moment here as long as I don't tear this up completely we're going to have the end of this barrel out there we go and there it comes come out of there so there she is so we got the end of the barrel out I'll set that aside and if I can give you a kind of a look on what it looks like on the inside you'll see that it's really really delicate and you can see it's it has been charred uh what we're going to do now we got it apart this is really easy now now we get some heat now remember if you had your moonshine in here that wood has already collected all that moonshine so be careful stand back because when you hit that when you put the flame in the residual alcohol that's in there that is very flammable will probably flame up on you but this one I know is not like that because I've done it before this is the second time that I'm going to reach our this and you just go in and just start to reach our and get it as dark as you're looking for I wouldn't go to dark and I wouldn't light it on fire but I'd get it as dark as you want to get it because what you're just trying to do is you're trying to get a char on the inside of the barrel remember we're not going to be able to replace any of those essentials that are inside the wood that you've already leached out but when you are going to do is you are going to have a newly charred barrel that's going to be a better filter mechanism for you and a clarifier for your spirits so and don't forget don't forget to char the bottom and don't forget don't forget to hold up your your top and give it a char so it depends on how long you do this on how charred it becomes because you know your your spirits are going to be in contact with this as well so suffice its enough I guess now now it takes believe it or not it will take four hands for me to put this back together and that's not a hard process it's just as easy as being able to hold the the top in place and there's a small ridge in here I think it a couple of hands and a couple of fingers to get this just in the right way and then replace your rings and I'd replace of course your first large ring your second ring once you get that on you can actually flip it over and replace the bottom rings the large the middle and the small ring and flip it back over and place your smaller ring on top once you get that done reseal your barrel like you normally would fill it with warm water and let it set overnight some will seal within an hour - some take all night to seal because that wood has to soak up all of that water and expand but once that's done you've got another charred barrel ready to reuse again so that's all we have for today hey thanks for joining us like us on Facebook if you get an opportunity visit our website leave us some a message give us some feedback we're doing the best we possibly can to ensure that your distilling is a pleasurable distilling experience thank you

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 224,255

Rating: 4.9276252 out of 5

Keywords: Charring, aging spirits, american white oak, home, barlerandhops, hops, distilling, and, using oak barrels, maturing spirits, barley

Id: HgKD6hA-_5c

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2015