Priming the Barrel

So, here’s what I know about the barrel: you put stuff in it, you wait, you drink. Now, that’s all well and good, but, I do need to know little more than that in order to make something that tastes good. It turns out, there is also some prep work that needs to be done before we can even start. First things first, because this is an authentic oak barrel – possibly made by hand – the holes for the spigot and bunghole are drilled after the barrel is formed, and I believe the ends of the barrel are forced into place after these states have been shaped. This causes they are to be debris inside the barrel. Also because the what is charred there is sediment and carbon that needs to get out of there.

The first thing do is to pick the barrel up and shake it, trying to get as many of the large pieces out as possible. This is a little difficult as the pieces tend to be larger than the hole and it’s tough to see inside. After a few days, an attempt with tweezers, and a flashlight, and vigorous shaking, I gave up trying to get the last few pieces out and moved on to rinsing out the barrel in order to clean out the loose char and sediment from inside. In doing so, I also discovered that this is, in fact, the best way to remove the chunks of wood that are left inside the barrel the barrel making process.

Once the water runs clear, we have to make the barrel watertight. A misconception I was had about wooden barrels was that they were watertight. I mean, they’re a very common storage vessel for various liquids, and they don’t seem to leak. What didn’t occur to me is that a real barrel isn’t sealed. There is no glue between the staves. It’s not like they melt wax and seal all the cracks. The staves are just pieces of wood that are bent into shape and held in place by the metal rings. The reason barrels don’t leak, is because the wood soaked in water, and has swelled. The swelling creates a natural seal.

Doing this at home is actually pretty simple. All we do is insert the spigot, make sure it’s in tightly and closed, then fill the barrel of the way with water. Insert the stopper into the bunghole (no giggling), set the barrel on its stand, and place the whole thing in a bucket of some sort to catch the water that is going to leak out. The bucket is important, because water will sneak out. I quickly learned that it’s best to the funnel for this, because the bunghole (no giggling) isn’t all that large, and it’s more difficult to see the leaks when the rest of the barrel is wet. After about a day, took the bucket in the barrel to see how much, if any, water has leaked out, and if it is still leaking.

It probably will have leaked, and depending on where the leak is the water level was dropped to that point. I still wasn’t comfortable with the cleanness of the inside of the barrel, so I dumped out the rest the water, and refilled it, but it is okay to simply top the barrel off. After a few days, the wood should have swelled and the leaks should have stopped. At this point, we dump out the water, and we’re ready to fill it with booze!

Up next: we fill it with booze!

What's All This Then?

Where to start? At the beginning, I guess. In the beginning, the universe expanded rapidly. Then, the dust collected into galaxies and stars and planets, and then the planets cooled and corn grew and people mashed it up and turned it into whiskey. Eventually, someone made a barrel. People found that the whiskey stored in this barrel turned in the something magically delicious, and they called it Bourbon. Sure, there’s more to it than that, but for the purposes of this blog, that’s all you really need to know.

It's so cute!

This past Christmas, my buddy Jim bought me my very own whiskey barrel. It’s a cute little thing, two liters big and, well, barrel shaped, this own little stand and spigot and bunghole (no giggling). Now, Jim has had a barrel for a while now, so I get the principle of it, and I’ve had Bourbon and other beverages that he produced. However, the only experience I have with any sort of home brewing is chatting with Troy at work about his efforts in brewing his own beer. All I really knew about the barrel was that Jim put stuff in it, and tasty stuff came out. So, I knew that if I was going to produce anything at all I would need to do some research.

In the course of this research, I read a blog that suggested not just putting alcohol in the barrel and letting it age, but taking a more scientific approach, taste testing the contents of the barrel weekly, and taking notes and making observations on the progress of the product. Something about this approach resonated with me. Partly, I think, because I consider myself a scientist, both by profession and in nature. Also, I like the idea of keeping track of everything, keeping everything organized, not just throwing booze in a barrel and waiting three months in seeing what happens. If the bourbon comes out bad, or strange color, with no continual record of what happened during that time, I have no idea what went wrong, or how to fix it. Even aside from that, even if the bourbon comes out good, or even just passable, I would like to be old to see what goes on when so that if I want to change part of the process next time, I know that maybe in week six the colors start to darken more or even out, or whatever.

I will be keeping my scientific journal in a physical notebook, but I also wanted to transcribe my notes into something more permanent on my computer working also include photos that will be hard to insert into a physical notebook, and also expand on the quick notes jotted down in pencil. I figured that if I was going to put all this in Word, I might as well just blog it. That way, perhaps others can read about my experiences, and either learn something from what I’ve done, give me advice on how to proceed in the future, or just be entertained by my attempts to make bourbon.

So, this blog will be the record of my attempts to aid bourbon in my very own 2-liter oak barrel. I am a few weeks in already, but I will post my first a few observations as separate entries just for the sake of simplicity and uniformity.