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Barrel
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A number of wood products are available to homebrewers to get wood characteristics without using a barrel. While barrel flavors are generally not the primary goal of funky beer brewers who use barrels for fermentation and aging, wood can contribute some of the additional characteristics that barrels offer (such as mouthfeel influences) and can also be used to house microbes in a similar way to a barrel (Vinnie's dimebags). The most common non-barrel wood products available to brewers are oak based. Advantages of using these products over barrels include reduced cost, ease of use, and a more efficient use of the wood (the entire surface of the wood is exposed to the beer as opposed to only 40% of a barrels barrel's surface area) <ref name="Cioch‑Skoneczny_2022">[https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00217-022-04143-3.pdf Influence of oak chips addition on the physicochemical properties of beer. Monika Cioch‑Skoneczny, Mateusz Bajerski, Krystian Klimczak, Paweł Satora, Szymon Skoneczny. European Food Research and Technology. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00217-022-04143-3.]</ref>.
'''Chips''' - Oak chips maximize surface area and have less variability in the depth of toast. Oak chips are not ideal because if the brewer is after flavor contribution chips will be more one dimensional and if the brewer is not after a wood flavor contribution, oak chips will give faster flavor extraction than other options and will therefore not give the other benefits of oak as well as other products.