tom, how nice. Now you too can join the ranks of " hey, I gotta brew, I have to keep my barrel full".funny how this works, you think you own the barrel, uh uh,,,,it owns you!
Exactly. I plan to keep it full as much as possible, and since I'm not likely to get to the BVIP very soon it would have to be the 3rd or 4th batch to go into it, by which time I figure the bourbon would have fallen off.Then again, this will eventually be a sour barrel, so I might need to go get another barrel for more bourbon aged beers. They're not going to have any more 5s after this, they plan to switch to 8 and 53 gallon barrels. An 8 would work out nice. Maybe next year. It's only a 25 minutes drive, I'll talk to them when I drop off some of the Bourbon RIS, or BRIS (what a terrible name for a beer, although maybe I should leave it in the barrel for 8 days - someone needs to suggest that to Jeremy Cowan).
Denny's BVIP calls for an addition of Bourbon back to the beerso with that, you could try to match the keg's contents and ifyou found the oak character dwindling lower than you like, you could always add back some spirals or cubes...but you could justgo for the wood exposure in your keg and think lengthy time...and you woulddefinately have a winner.