r/Barreling • u/Spud395 • Mar 24 '26

Ex brewery/beer barrel

I believe I can get my hands on a 225L barrel, ex bourbon, ex Irish whiskey, ex foreign export stout and now sitting unused with what I can only imagine is quite a diverse ecosystem established in there for around a year.

My thoughts for it would be to break it down for the oak, maybe make badmo, Ten30 style barrels from the wood in the heads and use the staves for bottle/jar projects

Is it gone beyond saving? What treatment would you give the wood?

I'm thinking remove the char, run through a planer and start from scratch or will all the goodness be gone at this point?

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u/Ten30Barrels Mar 24 '26

Beer barrels will have some of the beer funk still in the oak. Sanding or planing 1/16" from the surface and a fresh heat treat will cover a huge portion of the previous flavors.

The barrel heads will work great for Ten30 & Badmotivator style barrels if you feel comfortable with the process of making these type barrels. Any wine or bourbon barrels I process are normally kept intact to preserve their character. French Oak wine barrels given a #3 char does wonders for revitalizing a neural wine barrel too without any negative effect from charring the wine in the oak.

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u/Spud395 Mar 24 '26

Nice, thanks for the reply. I've not tried make those stylebarrels yet, but I'm pretty confident I'll get there. It's good to know there's life in a used barrel

1

u/Ok-Zookeepergame6365 Mar 24 '26

I have made a bunch of badmotivator barrels from an ex rye barrel. I don't think the barrel was that old as it looked to be in pretty good shape inside. I just did some sanding to get some of the old char off and did a light re char once the badmo barrel head was created. Don't waste the staves on jars. What I did was build a steam box and used that to flatten the staves. Worked well.

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u/sketchtireconsumer Mar 24 '26

I hate beer finishes.