Home Distiller

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

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.

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:

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

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.

sparkydan wrote: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 ).

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.

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.

Thanks everyone good advice

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