Oak off cuts from old Canadian whiskey barrels

[sparkydan]

Checking out small barrels for sale and the fella gave me some white oak peices , he showed me the barrels the off cuts were from, apparently there aged canadian whiskey one's. How would everyone else use them ?
Also to note not as easy to get in south australia as the us

[Bushman]

You can add color and flavor by storing them with your alcohol at cask strength 55%-62% in mason jars. Some folks would also advice to re toast or char the pieces.

[der wo]

Cut sticks out of it. Sand the surface (probably they are dirty). Then toasting and charring all around, because they did it only at one side.
From a JD stave after sanding and after charring:

[sparkydan]

Cool definitely aging with them. Thecooper told me not to remove the char tho ?

[der wo]

I sanded it off partially (as you can see on the picture), because
1. I don't know, where the staves were stored. I don't want to have dirt in my whiskey.
2. it doesn't work well, to toast and char only 3 of the 4 sides.

[Danespirit]

Cool definitely aging with them. Thecooper told me not to remove the char tho ?

When I char wood for whisky etc, I wash them and give them a slight rub to get rid of excessive coal on the surface.

1 It doesn't look appealing with small clumps of coal floating around in your spirit..
2 You will only get a grey/black soup out if it if you just toss them in without removing excessive coal.

Done right, they will add a nice golden to amber colour and give a delicious flavour (depends on how long you let them in there).
After ageing, rack the spirits in another container.. take the wood out...and filter through a coffee filter or the like to get rid of small particles.
Tip: Ageing with sticks instead of a barrel, will speed things up. So don't overdo it..taste a sample frequently (A sample...not a bottle ).

[Pesty]

being a woodworker at heart, what lies under the surface is what i'm after.

resurface the staves with a hand held power plane or 80 grit orbital sander and cut them into dominoes. Drill some holes and you have oak sticks. char some, toast some.

[masonsjax]

I have been aging at 65%, putting 600ml in a 1lt mason jar which makes it very convenient to later dilute to 45-50% (where I like it) right in the jar before filtering into a bottle.

Initially I used one stick per jar, 1" x 3/4" x 4 to 5 inch long. But the spirits were over oaking and getting too rich in flavor and dark in color. I've since been using half a stick, only 2-3 inches long and the oak character and color is spot on.

Like others, I prepared my barrel staves by sanding first, cutting to size, toasting in the oven, and charring with a torch. I've experimented with different levels of toast and char. So far I like toast at 400F for 2 hours and heavy alligator char the best all around.

[sparkydan]

Thanks everyone good advice

[jdetechguy]

Awesome writeups. I picked up some oak spirals last weekend. I have been using 5 liter barrels, but that limits my experiments.

Cranky's Spoon Feeding
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=52975