Yeah, I'm sure I'll have a lot of suffering to do there. This does give me a good idea of where to start my suffering course, though. No 1kg / gal. oak experiments, nor any 1g / 5gal trials. Thanks for the help.
Oak Cubes
- Thread starter THawk
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Yeah, I'm sure I'll have a lot of suffering to do there. This does give me a good idea of where to start my suffering course, though. No 1kg / gal. oak experiments, nor any 1g / 5gal trials. Thanks for the help.
My issue partly is cost -- I can't get oak here in the Philippines... and even if I could, I don't trust the source enough to actually place it in a bucket of mead. On amazon it costs about $10 for American and $15 for French... PLUS freight. Unless one of you folks could get some for me for less and I'll gladly paypal the money over... ;D
yes I "got it" straight away......Actually you "hit the nail on the head" earlier. Not only is it the liquid to area contact ratio, but thats exactly why wine makers use the industry standard sized barrels, as they found that it makes for another, controllable factor that can be managed to allow the wine to take on oak flavour with a set amount of time in thw wood.
As you rightly alluded to, smaller barrels will oak a batch much faster.
The other factors are the level of toasting and the origins of the wood.
As I read it, Hungarian oak is still considered as the premium stuff, with the flip of a coin between French and American oak depending on what properties you want from the wood.
Whoever mentioned spirits barrels earlier was looking in the right direction but facing the wrong way. A wine barrel has A LOT less toasting than a spirits barrel. You could take a wine barrel thats been used a couple of times and retoast (char or burn really) it for spirits and it'd be excellent yet not the other way round. A spirits barrel would have far too much charring for wines unless the maker actually did want a darkened burnt flavour in the mead.......which I doubt!
Ha! You'd have to do a lot of suffering to make batches the size that Brother Adam did and 7 years in oak is a long time to wait for that kind of pain
