Barrels vs. Chips

This is a bit of an overspill from my beer blog, but I just wanted to clarify a point I was trying to make on the Aleheads blog. It's essentially why I feel that chips are not as good as barrels with respect to quality wine-making. Brother Barley makes the following point with reference to using oak chips rather than barrels:

First, there’s the problem of stigma. In the wine industry, many (if not most) educated oenophiles won’t even purchase a wine if they believe it’s been aged with oak chips instead of barrels. Even though blind taste tests have proven that wine drinkers can’t tell the difference, there is still a strong belief that wood chips are the “wrong” way to oak-age wine. While this kind of “old-school” mentality is less prevalent amongst Aleheads than oenophiles, it’s still an issue.

Although I'm loathe to disagree with the point that Brother Barley makes in that there isn't a discernible difference between oak chips and a new oak barrel, because I've never been in a position to taste the same wine made using the two different methods. I think the point about it being an old school mentality is a bit of an over-simplification.

The problem is that, in a way, saying you use oak chips is pretty much confessing that your wine is no good in the first place, as would using new oak simply to make up for a lack of character - it's no substitute for making a good wine in the first place. To quote the Oxford Companion to Wine:

Oaky is a tasting term usually applied to wines too heavily influenced by oak flavour, which smell and taste more of wood than fruit, and may be aggressively tannic and dry.*

What you can't do with oak chips, which Brother Barley explains in his following paragraph with reference to "used bourbon-barrels or scotch-barrels," is impart character from the 'previous inhabitant' of the barrel, as it were. In the case of wine-making, this previous inhabitant is invariably wine rather than something else. Because new barrels are expensive and their characteristics not always desirable (they can overpower a subtle wine) they are generally used with moderation, and in conjunction with older barrels - complexity of flavour is the key.

Top wineries that do use a lot of new oak allow the wines an extended period of maturation in the barrels, and I'd suggest this process of slow stabilisation and clarification, along with a mild oxygenation, is at least as important as a simple imparting of wood flavour. Almost inevitably, there are relatively new micro-oxygenation techniques that are designed to replicate even this, but they are yet to be widely used.

* 3rd Ed. p.491

A Waste of Good Beer?

Since I started learning more about wine and spirits I've found oak a fascinating subject, and so I thought I'd attempt to do a bit more exploration of how it effects beer. It seems to be something of a divisive subject among beer enthusiasts judging by posts such as this one on Rob's beer quest, and Ghost Drinker's defence. If, as has been suggested, 'there is no such thing as a great barrel aged beer' then I'm going to have a go at finding one anyway.

Normal size Geordie bloke, whacking great big barrel,
still nowhere near 10,000 gallons though.

My initial thought is that, like most things, oak used well will contribute to the character of the beer. Judiciously used it should add complexity to rather than detract from the 'primary' flavours that come from the base ingredients. I'm not claiming to know anything about how beer works with oak, hence the exploration. However, from my wine and spirit studies and tastings I think I've got a fair idea of what flavours could possibly be imparted from an oak barrel, and I apologise if I have to dip into wine vocabulary and terms. I'm also going to try and find out how the barrels are used, to get away from a simple 'barrel aged' statement, which I think can be pretty meaningless - as I've mentioned before. The devil's in the detail - a beer like Dogfish's 'Red and White'* which has been matured in a 10,000 gallon oak tank is going to pick up relatively little (if any) flavour due to the ratio of liquid to surface area of wood - certainly compared to a beer matured in a smaller barrique sort of size (like the smaller ones in the photo.)

The beers I've got for this mini experiment (at the moment) are from Harviestoun, Innis and Gunn, Traquair and Tullibardine. Since I love Scottish beer in the first place I suppose the question is whether it will be ruined by the barrel? The plan is to taste the beers as I normally would but I'll try and decide what difference the barrel ageing (or in one case, fermenting) has made by way of a conclusion.

* Thanks to Phil for pointing this one out.