Brewers have barrels of fun

Cambridge Brewing Company uses oak chardonnay barrels in aging its Arquebus barleywine. (Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)

One label reads: "The caramel and vanilla complexity comes from the exotic Paraguayan Palo Santo wood." Another hints at characteristics of French oak, described as "qualities of toasted coconut, almond biscotti, and toasted almonds with a taste of honeysuckle." But neither a chardonnay nor a cabernet is benefiting from time in wood barrels. It's beer - Dogfish Head's Palo Santo Marron and Southern Tier Brewing Company's Cuvee Series One, respectively.

Brewers also like to market their wares by telling consumers about the past lives of the barrels their beers were aged in: "Matured in Lagavulin whisky casks" reads the label on a bottle of J.W. Lees Harvest Ale barleywine. And the salty sea-air flavor that's a hallmark of Lagavulin really is detectable when you taste the Harvest as well.

Before the advent of stainless steel fermenting casks, beer was fermented in wood, but the barrels were often lined with pitch to stop evaporation, effectively keeping the beer from picking up any flavor from the wood. (There are exceptions, notably the Belgian brewing tradition, where unlined wooden vessels have always been used in fermenting certain beers.)

But craft brewers are an inquisitive lot, always wondering what would happen if they used a new technique or ingredient. "We get curious about stuff and just do it," says Rob Tod, founder of Maine's Allagash Brewing Company, where about 100 barrels - some previously used for bourbon and some for wine - are part of the aging process.

Tod says that the company's first foray into barrel aging, in 2004, was a matter of necessity. They had a batch of tripel, a style of strong Belgian ale, ready to be bottled, but the shipment of glass had been held up. There were two bourbon barrels in house, so the brewers decided to put the beer in the barrels until the bottles arrived.

"We thought a tripel and bourbon barrels would be a bad combination," Tod says, but they tried it, and it worked. Curieux was born, and other barrel-aged Allagash beers, such as Interlude, a Belgian-syle ale, and Odyssey, a wheat beer, followed. "It's just amazing to see how the wood transforms the beer," Tod says.

For Will Meyers, brewmaster at Cambridge Brewing Company, barrel aging beer was also a matter of necessity, of a sort.

In 1998, Meyers explains, "I was getting tired [of brewing], physically and mentally." He decided to renew his enthusiasm by making a beer employing every brewing technique he could think of from around the world. These included using brettanomyces yeast (which gives the beer a slightly tart, sour flavor) and aging in wood bourbon barrels that Meyers got from Boston Beer Company, where they had been used to ferment Sam Adams Utopias.

The resulting brew, which he named Benevolence, did what Meyers had hoped it would: It re-energized his interest in brewing, inspiring him to dive deeper into barrel-aging, and it won a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival in the Experimental Beer category in 2004.

Today there are about 50 barrels - bourbon, red wine, and white wine - crowded into a low-ceilinged corner of Cambridge Brewing's basement, and Meyers has eight brews fermenting in the barrels, including an imperial stout, a porter, and a barleywine aging in bourbon barrels, and a brown ale in pinot noir barrels.

At this year's Great American Beer fest, Meyers's Arquebus, a summer barleywine aged in oak chardonnay barrels, won a gold medal. He seems to be on a roll.

Ann Luisa Cortissoz can be reached at a_cortissoz@globe.com.