This will by my fifth attempt to make a Bourbon Barrel Stout in the vain of the great Goose Island Bourbon Country Brand Stout. If you have never had it, it's a beer with a very strong bourbon character - there are many beers that market themselves as being bourbon barrel aged and I find almost all to be disappointing compared with BCBS. It's a beer that is released once a year in small quantities so I find I never have enough to drink it as much as I want. Being able to make a reliable clone would be a very nice thing.
I have learned some valuable lessons with my previous 4 beers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th) but none have gotten particularly close to the real thing. Some lessons learned:
- Aging the beer with the appropriate amount of oak to simulate contact with a barrel is very important
- About 56 sqin per gal of oak surface area
- Toasting and Charing the oak to the right level is important
- See this experiment on oak aging for how I arrived at a good number
- Aging the oak with a barrel strength alcohol is critical to getting the intensity of whisky flavors
- Making sure that the created bourbon tastes like bourbon is important
- I have settled into aging my oak at a higher oak to spirit ratio than used in a barrel to conserve spirit. I have found in previous batches that this creates more of a caramel flavor than vanilla compared with the normal oak to spirit ratio. I experimented with boiling the oak before aging to mellow it a bit such that I would get more vanilla.
- Getting the beer to finish at around 1.035 is critical as an overly sweet beer will hide the whisky flavors and throw off the balance
- This bit me on my last batch which ended up at 1.042 and definately too sweet. I think using a very strong yeast (White Labs 099 Super High Gravity Yeast) is critical to ferment down such a big beer (starts at 1.13 to 1.14)
- Having the oak saturated with spirit such that it fortifies the beer is very important I think
- I did some calculations and came up with about 5 oz of spirit absorbed into the oak per gal of beer was a good target
I plan on taking very good notes this time to hopefully give myself a reasonable shot at reproducing these results if it's a winner.
Other than these notes, I will be brewing basically the same recipe I've used in all the previous attempts. This was provided by Goose Island in a promotional video linked in my first attempt. As I believe I've said before, their lack of protection of the recipe makes sense in a way because getting into the fermentor is relatively easy compared with trying to get it to ferment down enough and then in getting their magical bourbon character. I'm very excited to be trying this again
Recipe Details:
- Grain:
- 22 lbs Pale Ale
- 8 lbs Light Munich
- 2 lbs Crystal 60L
- 1.5 lbs Chocolate Malt
- 1.5 lbs Roasted Barley
- 12 oz Black Patent
- 4 oz Acid Malt
- Hops:
- 3 oz Chinook (Pellet, 11.8% AA) at 60 min
- Yeast:
- White Labs 099 - Super High Gravity Yeast (2nd Pitch)
- Water:
- 15 gal spring water
- 5 gal tap water
- 2 tsp CaCl
- 2 tsp Gypsum
- 1 tsp Irish Moss at 1 min
- Batch Size:
- 6.5 gal (Target 6.5 gal)
- Mash:
- 152 F for 60 min
- Boil:
- 4 hrs
- Fermentation Temperature:
- 68 F (Ambient Basement Temps)
- Primary Duration:
- 1 month
- Secondary Duration:
- > 6 months
- OG:
- 1.140 (Target 1.025)
- Efficiency:
- 72% (Target 66%)
- FG:
- TBD (Target 1.035)
- Apparent Attenuation:
- TBD (Target 68%)
- ABV:
- TBD (Target 12%)
Brewing Notes:
- 3/13/26 - Prepared my Oak
- 7/2/26 - Prepared a yeast starter for part of the yeast I intended to pitch (pulled from my barleywine)
- 7/6/26 - Brewday - from 11 AM to 6 PM including setup and cleanup
- Heated 8 gal of strike water to 175 F
- Milled half my grain and added half the gypsum and CaCl to it
- Moved 7.5 gal of strike water the the mash tun and cycled through the Grant and RIMS until it was 162 F
- Stopped the cycle and added my grain - stirred well to eliminate doughballs
- Let the mash settle for 10 min before cycling the RIMS again
- Heated 6 gal of sparge water to 185 F
- At the end of the mash I slowly drained into the boil kettle. I setup a fly sparge as I collected and ran until I had 7 gal
- I started to heat the kettle after collecting and had it at a boil shortly after the end of the sparge
- Boiled for 2 hrs
- I collected a couple gal of extra wort from the first mash which I am returning to the second mash
- Milled my second half of grain. Added the other half of Gypsum and CaCl to this
- Cleaned out the mash tun
- Heated the second mash Strike water (6 gal) to 185 F
- Added 5 gal of strike water pls the 2 gal of remaining mash water to the mash tun and cycled through the RIMS until it had settled to 162 F
- Added the grain to the mash tun and stirred to eliminate dough balls. Let this sit for 10 min and then cycled through the RIMS at 153 F
- Heated 5.5 gal of sparge water to 185 F
- At the end of the first 2 hr boil I was down to about 3 gal of wort. I drained the second mash ton into the boil kettle slowly to maintain the boil. I fly sparged until I'd collected 10 gal of wort
- Boiled for another 2 hrs to reduce down to about 6 gal. Had to pay attention to avoid boil over at first
- Added hops at 1 hr left
- Added Irish Moss at 15 min
- With 5 min left, I added to wort chiller to sanitize
- Chilled down to about 80 F
- Drained the beer into 2 fermentors. Let the beer fall about a foot to aerate. Pitched my yeast during the transfer (both from my starter and from the barleywine fermenter - split the two between the two)
- Collected about 6.5 gal of beer and measure the gravity as 1.140
- Set this up in my basement to ferment with the lids loosly attached
- 7/7/26 - By the next day, very vigorous fermentation was underway - krausen pushed out the airlocks even with the 6 gal buckets about half full
