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When is a barrel-aged beer, not actually a barrel- aged beer? That’s the issue that Innis & Gunn, a Scottish brewer with a reputation for wood-aging their beers, is trying to weather.
You see, seven years ago the Edinburgh-based brewery was confronted with a shortage of rum and bourbon barrels. And they eventually turned to a process that was developed by the founder and master brewer Dougal Gunn Sharp that was different from traditional barrel-aging
According the Drinks Business, Innis & Gunn’s current technique “involves cutting up the staves of rum and bourbon barrels, toasting the pieces and adding them back to the beer for five to 10 days while it’s in the tank.”
For a while the brewery had referred to their beers as being ‘oak-aged’ rather than ‘barrel-aged.’ But Innis & Gunn is now billing all of their beers as being barrel-aged, insisting that soaking barrel-chips in their beer is the same actually as aging their beer in barrels.
So yes, this is a bit of a linguistic dance on Innis & Gunn’s part, and the UK’s brewing community is all over the place on the issue.
The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), Britain’s leading voice when it comes to cask beer, doesn’t have an official stance on the issue. The barrel-aging process as it’s traditionally understood, isn’t normally used in the brewing of real ale.
Others disagree…A recent article The Morning Advertiser, offered up brewing professionals who strongly rejected the idea that using bits of old barrels to tone a beer was the same thing ads aging a beer in a whole barrel.
In the United States, the Brewers Association’s definition of a barrel-aged beer is pretty clear…
“A wood- or barrel-aged beer is any lager, ale or hybrid beer, either a traditional style or a unique experimental beer, that has been aged for a period of time in a wooden barrel or in contact with wood.”
So we expect that this controversy will go on (until it doesn’t) and people will either buy Innis & Gunn’s argument (and their beers), or not.
But maybe the real question should be “do you enjoy the beers that Innis & Gunn are crafting?” Rather than…”are they correctly labeled?”
Just sayin’…
