Whisky Magazine – August 2019

58 Whisky Magazine | Issue 161

Production Irish Beer Casks

C

asks arrive in Ireland

having been ‘seasoned’

around the world, using

Bourbon in the USA, sherry

in Spain, port in Portugal,

with each adding a different accent

to the resulting flavour. An additional

source of seasoning is local, and utilises

another Irish speciality – brewing.

Casks that previously held stout, porter,

red ale and IPA are adding a finishing

touch to mature whiskey (rather than

full-term ageing).

“The principle is the same whichever

cask type you’re using, but beer casks

don’t add additional layers of flavour to

a whiskey in quite the same way that

wine or fortified wine casks do when

used as finishing casks, the flavours

from beer casks are typically imparted

in a shorter time and as a result more

challenging to predict,” says Iain Wood,

operations manager, Teeling Whiskey.

So, how can master blenders be

successful matchmakers, and select

casks that will have a meaningful

relationship with their whiskies?

“Tasting the beer and nosing the cask

gives you an idea of what to expect, but

it’s not a direct translation of the beer

character into the whiskey. IPA casks

typically give citrus, apple and a hoppy

character, while stout casks impart

coffee, chocolate, butterscotch and

softness on the palate, but there’s still

a lot of work to be done to understand

exactly what happens during the

maturation process,” says Dave Quinn,

master of whiskey science at Midleton

Distillery (Irish Distillers).

Having selected a type of beer,

distillers supply their own casks to the

brewery to be ‘seasoned.’

“We send Bourbon barrels to three

local breweries – O’Hara’s fills them

with stout, while Rascals fill with coffee

stout, which has an Irish coffee note and

a different influence to stout, which is

more robust.

"Five Lamps fill our casks with red

ale, which is slightly less intense than

stout,” says Darryl McNally, master

distiller, Dublin Liberties Distillery.

A variation on Bourbon barrels are

casks previously used to age rum in

the Caribbean, which Teeling sends to

Galway Bay Brewery to be seasoned

with imperial stout for at least two

months (though these ex-rum casks

were originally ex-Bourbon barrels).

Once casks have been seasoned,

breweries bottle the beer as a limited-

edition, and return the empty casks.

However, the staves retain a certain

amount of ‘residual beer’ which has

been absorbed by the oak, and filling

the cask with whiskey prompts this

liquid to leech from the staves and

integrate into the whiskey. This is

considered the greatest influence

during the finishing period, which

raises the question of how, and how

soon, the flavour profile evolves.

“When we first filled stout-seasoned

casks we were looking for dark

chocolate, coffee and roast barley

notes from the stout. You can capture

these three notes all together though

they don’t all peak at the same time,

as flavours can increase then plateau

or even disappear. Chocolate notes for

example get better every week, but after

12 to 16 weeks they’ve gone. So, the

question is when to stop? The only way

to decide is to keep sampling. We end

the finish at around four to six months,

WORDS IAN WISNIEWSKI

Irish whiskey is being filled into a range

of beer barrels, what do they have to offer?

KEEPING IT LOCAL

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