Oak Aging Experiment (Setup)

At some point while I was sitting at the Bears game and freezing my ass off last weekend, my thoughts drifted to how nice it would be to have a flask of something strong and brown to warm me up. Naturally I then drifted on over to beer and how it'd be nice to oak-age some of the Russian Imperial Stout we've got left after the angriest fermentation I've ever witnessed...

Thankfully, I had some medium toast American oak cubes left over from the Firestone Double Barrel Ale clone Jeremy and I brewed towards the end of the summer. So after a bit of researching proper oak handling and the appropriate quantities to use for aging on a homebrew scale, here's what I did.

• The consensus seems to be that 1-2oz of cubes per 5 gallon batch is about right. Since I'm going to be aging in 1/2 gallon growlers, I measured out 4 x .2oz (6g) portions of oak cubes. (The thought here is also that cubes give a more complex, layered flavor than chips. Since this is already a big, complicated beer I wanted that complexity instead of just straight oak flavor.)
• I boiled some water and poured enough over each portion to cover the cubes and monitored the temperature to make sure it stayed over 180F for 20 minutes to pasteurize the cubes
• At the same time, I sanitized the jar which would hold half of the cubes and a generous measure of bourbon.
• While the chips were pasteurizing, I sanitized two growlers, complete with stoppers and airlocks.
• I also sanitized the shiny new beer gun Jeremy and I went in on...
• Back upstairs, I transferred half the cubes into each of two sanitized jars and added some Maker's to one set to soak for a few days.
• Set up the beer gun and filled the two growlers, adding 6g of cubes to each.

And now we let them age for a couple of months. It's going to be difficult to stare at those growlers and wonder what delicious chemical magic is going on inside of them, but I'm sure that the end result will absolutely be worth the wait.

I'll repeat with the bourbon soaked cubes this weekend when we bottle off the rest of the batch. More to come on the Blichmann Beer Gun, but my initial take is that it f'ing rocks.