The Barrel-Aged Cocktail Experiment

We went to The Office (beneath The Aviary) for Marybeth’s birthday last year and on their menu they had a barrel-aged Boulevardier cocktail and it was one of the best I’d ever tasted. Theirs was aged for… 3 months? 6 months? Something like that. The flavors had blended so perfectly that the usual bite of that cocktail had given way to an incredibly smooth palate and my interest was piqued.

I researched how possible it would be for me to make this thing at home and found that there are places online that will sell you a decent cocktail-making barrel for like $50. Once it arrived in my kitchen, I learned that barrels are just wooden slats tied together with metal bands. This means the barrel leaks. The way to seal a barrel is to fill it with water to let the wood soak and swell and seal the cracks between the slats. This takes some time (days). Once it stops swelling, you might , as I did, still have some leaks to plug with beeswax. Once you’re done sealing the thing, the barrel might look a bit… gummy. Your friends might ask questions about the hygiene of this thing, and you might have to talk about the ani-microbial properties of wood and alcohol.

First Batch

Finally, I put my own Boulevardier recipe into the wooden cask and let time do its thing. I bottled a portion of the mixture on its own at the start, as a control group to taste test against as the contents of the barrel aged. We started tasting it after a few weeks, and the results were great! The flavors blended and you could taste a difference from the control group.

A smaller barrel has a much higher surface-to-volume ratio than a larger barrel, so the aging effect is much more pronounced. Supposedly, a month in my little 5 liter barrel was analogous to 3 months in a full 50 gallon barrel. So by the end of the barrel’s contents - around October, 8 months later - the cocktail had aged an equivalent 2 years!

Then I let the barrel rest. I filled it with water to ensure the wood stayed sealed, but put it aside for a few months. I had planned to refill it with a similar whiskey-based cocktail (to not clash too much with the flavors that the first had imparted on the wood and that would surely be imparted onto the next batch) but wanted to give myself some time away from that same cocktail flavor for a while.

The barrel takes up space in the kitchen, and so visitors would ask about it often. One of our friends, while we were away, even tasted the holding water, thinking it was another cocktail. It became clear I needed to use it or lose it.

Second Batch

In march of this year I started another batch. I washed it out and began anew. This time, I opted for something a bit sweeter and more complex, but still echoing the whiskey and amaro from before: A Devil’s Soul. I expected the first batch to have imparted a strong flavor to the inside and wanted to swim with that current rather than fight it. This time I kept a whole liter or so of the batch bottled separately, out of the barrel as a larger control group.

As it aged, we tasted it and I was less impressed. It seemed that the longer ingredient list and more complex flavors were actually dulled by the barrel this time around. Maybe the first batch was imparting more of its own flavor than I expected.

And then Marybeth was pregnant and we haven’t been having cocktail parties as much and so the barrel has stayed fuller than expected and I also need to be making counter space for non-cocktail things. So this week I bottled the remaining contents from the barrel (now aged 5 months) and laid it to a permanent rest. If you come visit in the new few months, I’ll probably still have some for you to try, you just won’t see the barrel!

Results

I think the barrel is a fun little gift and toy. For cocktails, the barrel’s first batch will taste the best and then subsequent batches won’t have the same mellowing effect (if you use the same recipe) or will have their flavors confused (if you don’t use the same recipe). The barrels are cheap enough and you hold them for long enough that you could get a new barrel each batch, which I would do in the future. I also learned that I would rather make new cocktails and play with new recipes than keep dipping into the same flavor over months.