Yin Part Three - Draining the Barrel

After seven months

A lot has happened since I first started talking about the large batch of Baltic Porter the Tao of Fermentation planned on aging in an used red wine barrel.  To start with, the beer became known as Yin with its brother Yang starting to take shape quite recently. I also started referring to the Tao of Fermentation as the Fellowship of Tao Brewers. Since putting the beer into the barrel in mid January (13.13.13 if you recall ;) ) I'd made it a point to taste it once a month to see how it was going.  In the May time frame I felt it was getting pretty close to being ready and my June I was convinced of it so we started talking about ways to get it out of the barrel.

One of the beers I opened

It was decided that we would set the date for exaction to occur at our August meet up.  Shawn had a long rod of stainless steal which he fashioned into a racking cane and Daniel procured a self priming pump.

In addition to collecting the beer I thought it would be fun to watch Beer Hunter the Movie while drinking some beer off of Shawn's beer engine in honor of Michael Jackson in addition to opening some Michael Jackson worthy beers.  Unfortunately the draining of the barrel, drinking of beer and general comradery was too load to really hear the movie so I'll have to check it out at a later time.

The beer itself came out really well and measured 1.014 FG. When you consider the overall group average gravity of was right around 1.095 SG we're looking at an ABV of 10.76% with an apparent attenuation of 83.82%, pretty outstanding.  The flavor was fantastic and we noticed there was some stratification that the different levels with the first pull being very different from the last pull.  

I ended up with three vessels pulled from the around the beginning, middle and end totaling around 11 gallons. I believe the extra couple of gallons kegged is really Shawn's as he only brought a single keg with him so I prepped a keg for him that was filled with the last couple of gallons.

The barrel crew and the fruit of our labor

Instead of leaving the beer how it is I plan on dividing what I have into three beers.  The batch I already have kegged I'll leave as is and rotate in as a spot on the crate becomes available. The 4.5 gallons I collected in a carboy I'm adding three vanilla beans to and will let it sit for a couple of months.  To the last keg I am also adding a vanilla bean and half a cinnamon stick, once this is done I planning on BeerGunning it to share with Shawn.

I'd like to see what everyone does in the next few months and try to organize a tasting where we can taste the different directions everyone went.  I'm also interested in see if a grand cru blend can be created.  

From here the barrel needs to be cleaned, sanitized and sealed until the next round.  In my head I'm torn between an imperial oatmeal stout (Imperial Rhino) or an old ale.   

Till then στην υγειά σας

-SNB

Putting the "Yin" in the Barrel

Barreling Filling Fun

Shortly after putting together the post for the Red Wine Barrel Aged Baltic Porter I posted up a link to it on the Tao of Fermentation with the statement - "The Tao barrel project - really needs a code name". It wasn't long before Daniel pointed out that "Yin is shadow, represented by the black side of the Yin/Yang symbol. We can call this one Yin. Then if we ever make a Witbier or something in a Chardonnay barrel like Chris brought up, that would be Yang." Not only did this statement seem to name the beer it also has the added effect of getting the ball roll on the next group brew, a Golden Strong, and the search for a Chardonnay barrel to put it in.

After a little over a month in primary it soon became time to transfer the beer to the barrel. As a child of the 80s I decided to take advantage of the date and aim for the 13th minute of 13th hour of the 13th day of the 13th month of the 13th year aka 13/13/13 13:13 aka Smarch 13th 2013 and damn if the Smarch weather wasn't ever in full effect later that night.

To prep for the transfer I had a number of things to do.  First and foremost I had to construct a movable wine barrel rack. If you take a look at the barrel pictured in the Sour Seven posts you can see the rack Shawn built following directions he found on Vinesugar. For my barrel rack I decided to utilize a flat dolly I already had (which I was using for a TV so that I could roll it outside over hot summer days).  Bonnie helped me test out whether or not the dolly would support the barrel.  To convert it into something that could further support a full barrel, I devised a system of cut wood boards of various sizes.  I made sure to align some of the main supports underneath the metal straps holding the barrel together.  On top of this I put two flexible wood boards that would cradle barrel.

CO2 to push beer into the barrel

After I had built the rack it was time to prep the barrel for the beer.  To do this I made up a 15 gallon batch of HOT star-san and put it in the barrel.  I then went out to my front yard, set my phone for 15 minutes and rolled the barrel back and forth the length of my front yard.  This included flipping the barrel end over end for a couple of laps.  The goal was to make sure that the barrel was both water tight and that the sanitizer had the ability to get into every part of the barrel.

Once Shawn arrived we went over everything we had and started to formulate a plan of attack which we somewhat had when Daniel arrived a little bit later. The first order of business was to sanitize the tubes, the problem was that I had literally used every-last drop of star-san I had on barrel prep.   It wasn't a big deal as we just emptied the barrel into a tub which we then emptied into my mashtun.

Once we had everything ready we moved the pump and tubes over to the Beast to start the transfer.  It seemed to go a lot faster than it did for the sour seven and in no time we we're prepping to rack the beer from Chris' keg.  It was actually a pretty easy setup requiring only some CO2 to push the beer into the barrel.  Daniel had brewed up another 5 gallons to help top off however a miscalculation on my part over the size of the barrel meant that we were still short so I filled the head space with a blanket of CO2. 

Very interesting beverage

The current gravity is around 1.033, higher than we want it but not bad attenuation considering we started around 1.100.  I'll give it a couple of months to really soak up the intense red wine from the barrel before I start a monthly tasting on it.  I don't think I'll top it off more than once (if that) and just let the angels have their share.

One final note, speaking of Shawn he recently started back up his blog Brewnundrum.  If  you are interested in the scientific side of brewing I highly recommend checking it out.  The current topic is Aeration Revisited in which he splits a single wort into 4 fermenters and then oxygenated them via 4 different methods. Once done he compared the results and actually changed his own preferred method based on the results. Very cool. 

Lots of photos after the jump.

Cheers 

-SNB