Topic: Aging
Oak Alternatives for Beginners
Aging your homebrew in an oak barrel can add more dimensions to your beer by imparting complex wood characteristics such as vanilla, cloves, coconut, or caramel, but barrels are not ideal for
Techniques for Brewing Age-Worthy Beers
I suppose most of us have dreamt of producing a beer that we will keep for years so we can pull out a bottle on special occasions to impress our friends and
Making Barrel-Aged Homebrews
I started barrel aging beer over a decade ago after attending a National Homebrewers Conference. It is amazing to watch the trend start up again with the little guys and trickle up
Brewing Beers to Age: Tips from Pros
As wine connoisseurs have known for ages, sometimes your favorite drink is better when aged. Not all beers are ideal for cellaring. It takes the right style, ingredients, and techniques to brew
Cellaring Beer
To keep or not to keep. That may not be quite the question Hamlet asked himself, but it is one homebrewers and beer drinkers in general might well ask themselves. If you
Cellaring Beer: Tips from the Pros
Wine isn’t the only fermented beverage that can improve with age. Many high-alcohol and sour beers change for the better after a few months in a proper cellar. in this issue, two
Homebrewing Oak Alternatives
Back in the 1980s and 1990s brewers would often ask whether beers that spent a long time in oak casks, such as IPAs, would have an oak flavor. I would reply (accurately)
Oak Alternatives
What to do when you want oak, but barrel aging is out of the question.
Buying, Using & Maintaining a Barrel
Barrel maintenance for those new to oak barrels.
Barrel Aging: Pro Brewer Roundtable Tips
A roundtable discussion among professional barrel users.
Storing beer
This question reminds me of an article written by G. Bruce Knecht and published in the Wall Street Journal on January 30th. In his simple-minded article, Mr. Knecht criticized breweries that use
