Victoria Beer Week spotlights art of barrel-aged brew
New event celebrates ancient technique
The fourth annual Victoria Beer Week, which begins Friday and runs until March 11, launches a new event called All About the Wood at the Roundhouse at Bayview Place on Saturday.
This is B.C.’s first event celebrating barrel-aged beers exclusively, with more than a dozen breweries showcasing some of their most precious creations, many of which have spent more than a year locked away in barrels before being released in bottles or kegs. The event runs from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
So what is barrel-aged beer and why is it so special?
Once upon a time, all beer spent some time in wood. Until the mid-20th century, in fact, beer was fermented in big wooden vats and then stored and transported in sturdy and waterproof oak barrels.
Industrialization of the brewing industry led to the use of copper or stainless-steel tanks for fermentation and conditioning, along with glass bottles and, finally, aluminum cans and kegs. Barrels all but disappeared from the brewing industry.
After all, hygiene and qualitycontrol standards are extremely important to breweries, and there is no way to keep wooden vessels as clean as metal ones.
But wood has recently made a comeback in the craft-beer industry, with breweries choosing to age some beers in barrels or big wooden fermentation vessels known as foeders for several months or even years before bottling.
Barrel-aged beers are now among the highest-rated beers on the market, with price tags once reserved for fine wines. And like wine, many of these beers benefit from further aging in the bottle for a year or more, which has given rise to beer cellaring.
Craft brewers use barrels mainly in two ways: either to age an already strongly flavoured beer such as a stout or porter in a barrel that has previously contained a strong spirit like whisky or bourbon, or to slowly ferment a beer in a wooden barrel with certain yeasts and bacteria that will result in a sour beer.
Victoria’s Driftwood Brewery has long led the barrel-aging movement in B.C. The Rock Bay brewery has been releasing Singularity, a Russian Imperial Stout (13.2 per cent ABV) aged in bourbon barrels, annually for several years, and it has been fermenting and aging sour beer in wine barrels since 2010.
Bourbon barrel-aged beers exhibit vanilla and caramel notes, as well as the boozy flavour of bourbon itself.
“You’re essentially trying to pull the same sorts of flavours that you want to put into a bourbon when you put it in a charred barrel,” said Driftwood’s Jason Meyer, adding that Singularity spends from six to eight weeks in barrels. “Longer than that actually does no favours to the beer because you start to extract tannins and the beer starts to get astringent.”
For sour beers, brewers use barrels that contain funky bacteria and yeast in order to produce a uniquely sour and complex result. Depending on the style, fruit might also be added along the way to encourage refermentation.
“With each subsequent refilling of the barrel, the influence of the wood itself diminishes,” Meyer explains, “but the influence of the organisms that are now residing in the wood increases, so the second time you get a result in six months that maybe took a year the first time you filled it and there were no organisms in the barrel.”
Several other Victoria breweries that produce barrel-aged beers will be participating in All About the Wood, including Category 12 Brewing, Lighthouse Brewing, the Moon Under Water Brewpub, and Spinnakers Brewpub, along with several from the Lower Mainland.
Other attending breweries include Townsite Brewing in Powell River, which developed its own unique yeast culture for its Bois Sauvage; Bad Tattoo Brewing, which is coming all the way from Penticton to serve its La Resurreccion Cerveza Fuerte aged in tequila barrels; as well as Four Winds Brewing (Delta) and Strange Fellows Brewing (Vancouver), both of which will be bringing several of their immensely popular barrel-aged beers.
All About the Wood will take place in the Train Shop building at the Roundhouse at Bayview Place. Tickets are $35, which includes six tasters, with more beer tokens available for sale on site. Food can be purchased from a food truck parked outside.