We’ve all seen it so many times that we don’t really see it anymore: the oak barrel, staves silvered with age and sawn in half at the bilge, now used as a planter.
Barrels—those marvels at the intersection of nature and contrivance—find new purpose as décor, as common as cornhole boards in tasting rooms, beer gardens, and brewery patios. The bisected barrel is almost the last step on a long journey from acorn to ashes—a testament to the stalwart oak (and the resourcefulness of brewers).
Most of the barrels we see in breweries around the country are already on their second or third act. Filled first with wine or whiskey but now the home of dense stouts or mixed-culture creations, a brewery’s barrels blur the line between additives and vessels. The oak is both ingredient and environment, with each brewery handling the wood’s impact in its own way.
I asked brewers from across the country what it takes to source, maintain, and manage a collection of oak vessels—and why so many of them end up holding petunias instead of beer.
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Barrel Basics
Wood and beer go way back. For much of brewing history, the beverage would have been unthinkable without wooden fermentation tanks, conditioning vessels, or barrels for storage and transport. Modern brewers can choose to add the complexities of wood into their production environment, but it is not the easy, cheap, or fast way to make beer.
There’s just something about oak—white oak, especially—that works like a seasoning in liquid, adding to and transforming compounds in the wine or spirit or beer, deepening the sensory experience enough that it’s worth the added time and trouble for the oak devotee. In fact, it’s more than one something—it’s an array of qualities and compounds in the heartwood of the oak that leave their mark on what comes in contact with the staves.
“It’s flavor compounds,” says Eric Salazar, barrelmaster at New York’s Strangebird Brewery. “It’s micro-oxygenation. It’s intangibles that come across during sensory.” In the 1990s, Salazar was part of the team at Colorado’s New Belgium that adapted Old World, mixed-culture beer-making tech for the American scene. Even after 30 years of working with wood-aged beer, he says he’s still excited about the possibilities. “I’m still having fun with it.”
Crafting a watertight vessel from porous material is the purview of the cooper. While milling and construction techniques are essential for a barrel to hold water, the particular anatomy of white oak is what makes it possible. At the heart of the hardwood are structures called tyloses, which seal off the internal vascular network of the tree as it matures. That sealing is thought to prevent water loss during dry periods and slow the ingress of fungi and other pathogens into the tree. What’s good for the oak is good for the cooper, and—when a log is sawn correctly—the tyloses add to the lumber’s durability and resistance to leaks.
Each barrel stave begins as a quarter-sawn oak plank before it’s shaped into the curved and tapered form—often at a dedicated stave mill—then aged for years. Using simple tools, fire, and brute force, the cooper assembles the staves into a round held fast by hoops and capped with the barrelheads. There’s no joinery between the staves—the barrel is always under tension, and moisture swells the oak further, sealing any gaps in the construction. It’s technology that’s worked for hundreds of years without much change.
Once a trade as essential as it was ubiquitous, the coopers who remain now mostly supply distilleries and wineries. And they’re busy—barrel shortages are a fact of life in those industries, and the price of new barrels keeps climbing. While distilleries and large wineries may employ in-house coopers, this isn’t common at breweries. (A notable exception is Belgium’s Rodenbach, which has long employed two coopers to maintain its forest of impressive foeders.) Brewers pick up skills from other trades by necessity, becoming journeymen plumbers, electricians, and microbiologists in the operations of a craft brewery. In that context, dabbling in coopering isn’t too big of an ask.
Brewers aren’t doing a lot of barrel-building, and maintaining a good barrel requires just a minimal tool kit. A hammer or mallet is most important, though none of the brewers with whom I spoke use the specialized coopers hammer, which has a flat face and an elongated, curved peen used to drive hoops. The polymer dead blow hammer—often bright orange—seems to be the striker of choice in the cellar. The chisel-shaped hoop driver is the other essential, used to adjust the tension on the staves with a hammer’s blow, sealing off a leak between two staves.
The mallet solves a lot of problems with barrels, and leaks from wormholes or small fissures that can’t be sealed with a judicious application of beeswax are plugged with a wooden spile hammered into the stave. A leak at croze—the joint where the head meets the staves—can be stopped by pounding flagging, a thin material traditionally made from reeds, into the gap.
Oak as Ingredient and Environment
There are three common pathways for introducing barrels to the brewery: used spirit barrels, used wine barrels, and new oak vessels. Each represents a different end goal.
When you want to add big flavors to a base, freshly dumped spirits barrels are what you want. It’s typical for a brewery to fill a bourbon barrel with stout, age it for months, and then discard the barrel after the beer is blended. Not only has the used barrel been stripped of much of its desirable components—each subsequent fill of a barrel reduces the flavor impact of that barrel—but bourbon barrels are less durable than wine barrels. A distillery making bourbon can use each barrel only once, so American oak bourbon barrels don’t show the same level of fit and finish that (predominantly) French oak wine barrels do. Wine barrels are built to be reused, and they can be turned many times, lasting for decades with proper care.
“You can keep wine barrels as long as you want, maybe indefinitely, if you treat them right,” Salazar says. “Especially between batches.”
His recipe for between-batch barrel care begins with a thorough cleaning of any autolyzed yeast or bacterial pellicle that lingers after dumping, followed by a good steaming. Portable steam generators are indispensable tools in the barrel room for cleaning and conditioning barrels.
Sometimes a barrel needs a little more cleansing—perhaps it wasn’t the best-tasting barrel on the blending table, so it needs a reset, or perhaps it will be used for lagering—and then it gets the neutralizing treatment. An overnight soak with sodium percarbonate in warm water is the barrel version of a caustic cycle, and it’s balanced with a citric-acid rinse to prep the wood. The brewer can then rinse and fill the “zeroed out” barrel again, or else sulfur and store it for later use.
That first step—dumping leftover solids—is not always simple, especially when the barrel contained a fruit addition. Aggressive rinsing only gets so far, and everything from Shop-Vacs to ad hoc scoops made from bucket handles are used to remove as much as possible through the bunghole. Removing a barrelhead—not to mention replacing it—is a more advanced coopering skill, and most brewers try to avoid it.
“It’s tricky and intimidating,” says Brian Coombs, cofounder of Alesong Brewing & Blending in the countryside near Eugene, Oregon. “The first time I tried, it took me a couple of hours, but now it’s a 15-minute task.”
Alesong’s proximity to Oregon wineries makes it easy to get used wine barrels. Coombs, an amateur woodworker, wants to taste the impact of wood on the beer. Removing and scraping a barrelhead is one way to increase the oak’s exposure. He’s also experimented with running an old barrelhead through the planer in his garage shop to reveal fresher wood, as well as building barrelheads from different types of wood. (Highlighting the hyper-local vibes of Alesong, one of his go-to barrel-leak fixes is beeswax from an apiary just a few miles up the road.)
At Beachwood Blendery, about 900 miles south of Alesong in Long Beach, California, the goal is a re-creation of lambic-style beers. There’s a deep commitment to providing the ideal environment for the spontaneously fermented beer: The barrel room’s HVAC system is set to mirror the temperature changes of the Senne Valley near Brussels.
Harrison McCabe, Beachwood’s barrelmaster, says they try to balance the scientific approach of view with an artist’s point of view. “The beer does what it does,” he says. “You need to respect it, to build a relationship with it.”
Inoculating beer with wild yeast in a coolship then aging in oak introduces many variables to the fermentation equation, but McCabe tries to control what he can—such as the climate of the barrel room. He removes other variables where possible, preferring barrels that are as neutral as possible: “More a vessel than a contributor of flavor,” he says. Most of the barrel family is French oak from California wineries, and the American oak barrels in the collection add enough oak character that they’re used mostly for conditioning with tropical fruit, whose flavors play nice with the woodsy lactones and tannins.
McCabe says he aims to use the barrels for as long as possible, and he agrees with Salazar that a good cleaning is usually enough to bring a troublesome barrel back into favor. “Steam is amazing,” he says.
However, whether it’s because of persistent leaks or a stubborn infestation of unwanted microbes, sometimes a barrel has just got to go.
Barrels at the Beachwood Blendery in Long Beach, California. Photo: Ash Patino/Generic Brand Human
Oak’s Last Act
A barrel that’s gone too funky or one with persistent leaky spots is a typical candidate for retirement. Yet there’s another all-too-common reason for putting barrel stock out to pasture: the downsizing of a sour-beer program.
I heard it several times from brewers across the country: With craft beer as a whole struggling in the marketplace, resources to pursue the niche-within-a-niche of mixed-culture beer are scarce. Even well-established and influential producers are tightening their belts and shrinking their wood cellars.
So, what happens to all these surplus barrels? Breweries can often sell good stock to other breweries or homebrewers, but the leaky, funky problem casks—and most of the reused bourbon barrels—get the saw blade.
“We do a big planter sale around Mother’s Day,” Coombs says. “They’re always popular.”
A tour of wine-tasting rooms in any wine-producing region in the country will undoubtedly include some artworks, décor, or furniture built from repurposed barrels. There’s a veritable cottage industry that turns barrel staves and heads into serving trays, seating, or wall sconces for winery gift shops and the like. An artisan near Firestone Walker’s Barrelworks in Buellton, California, uses barrel hoops to craft iron sculptures. At a recent “pints and paints” night in the taproom at Smog City Brewing in Torrance, California, participants painted not on canvas, but on staves harvested from the brewery’s decommissioned barrels.
There’s a romance to the barrel’s oak that survives even longer than the barrel does, and reusing those pieces is an act of reverence—an acknowledgement that though the wood has done the job for which it was first felled, there is still life and vitality left in it. A wabi-sabi beauty magnifies the intrinsic majesty of the oak, and the imperfections, signs of use, and makers’ markings apparent on the wood remind us of all the effort and skill that shaped the lumber’s life.
Even old staves that don’t find their way to the craftsman’s workbench can still go out with a blaze—as fuel for a bonfire, or in the slow smolder of a cooking smoker.
