SS "casks" are not casks unless they can breathe and have bungs.
Do they?
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Hog Heaven is OBVIOUSLY a barleywine. A beer with a medium-heavy body, more malty than hoppy, and bitter.
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The best DIPA I had was oak barrel aged and hoppy as all hell. You obviously don’t think a ipa or dipa should ever be oak aged or spend time in a barrel. Thats crazy. And if a beer is aged in said way that in no way effects the style of the beer, that is the silliest thing I have ever heard. If its a barley wine its a barley wine. It doesn’t become so because the brewer decided to age his DIPA in an oak barrel for a month or two.
If you are talking serious long term aging for more than 2 months then I can see some of your point. But hoppiness isn’t going to dissolve in less than two months.
The only rule in brewing is that there are exceptions to every rule.
I’ve seen stuff that just should not work and yet somehow does.
Also kinda curious what your thoughts are on Brewdog’s Atlantic IPA considering that is based on the actual way IPA’s were traditionally done. They were put into oak barrels and sent out to sea. The fact is that if you really historically look at the style an IPA should be barrel aged. We know now that the fresher the hops are the better but there is no way you can argue that the beer is no longer an ipa if it spends time in the barrel because its just not so.
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I can say that hop flavor and even bitterness can be extremely crushed within 2 months, easily. That said, Upstream’s Oak-Aged IPA among others have been absolutely amazing. I guess it’s all about the hop usage, malts, and just luck of the draw on the barrel if an oaked ipa with be any good.
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I just don’t think so. My DIPA was brewed over 2 months ago. Its gotten progressively more bitter. Hopscotch who tasted it young and then almost a month later can attest to that. My understanding is that the falloff time is more like 4 months and beyond. I’m talking from brew time. Not from bottle time.
Its true that barrel aging can mess up an IPA or DIPA. I think we have all experienced that. However I think it depends on how its done. The hardest thing is striking the balance. The best barrel aged DIPA’s I have had featured some slight woodiness and modest vanilla notes from the barrel time but were not over the top.
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the original ipas were in fact traditionally aged in glass, but there was obviously a few people using barrels. this makes a huge difference as wood is porous and glass is not. also, ipa’s were originally made to last a long time, not necessarily get better over time. this is not to say that a desirable beverage cannot come from aging one, but it almost needs to be a new style of beer as some ipas do do better with age, some are destroyed. i had dfh sqall ipa the other day and was more than happy with it and thought it was a bit underrated on here. it was fairly dark for an ipa, very viscous with nice legs on the glass, barely carbonated, no intense fresh hop taste, still there, but a bit sweeter more than bitter. this makes it a completely different class of beer from a crisp pucker-faced fresh hop bomb, at least in my eyes. especially since its a ’single’ ipa.
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Very true all. Though anecdotal evidence on the use of glass vs barrels seems pretty evenly split from what I’ve read. Thats beside the point though as you are still aging it for extended periods. Your right as I said, we know that hops are best when fresh. Still I don’t think you can justifably call it a different beer no more than you can call a Hoppy American Barley Wine anything other than a barleywine no matter wether I think it is or not (I don’t, I think traditional english barley wines are the textbook definition of the style) but thats the point thats just my opinion. Its still an barley wine just as these barrel aged ipas are still ipas and dipas. And as with any beer some are good and some are not. I’m not one to ever discourage anyone from trying anything in terms of brewing. Creativity is how great beer is made.
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glass vs wood is completely 100% different. wood is constantly allowing new oxygen in, properly sealed glass does not. granted back then the glass would have not been hermetically sealed most times, still allowing new oxygen. in 100 years glass will have not obtained any new oxygen, which is obviously one of the primary causes of aging. thats why they bottle aged brews after a few months or a year typically instead of aging it in wood for 5-10 years, these brews only hold up that long if they are truly sealed.
a lot of these beers styles on here didn’t really exist 10 years ago. there is sweet stout, foreign stout, stout, imperial stout, etc. its only a matter of time before a brewer wants to make people aware that their brew is different from a normal ipa(right now, thats why aging is always mentioned), coins a new term for an aged ipa that catches on and eventually leads to a new style. not that all of the styles didn’t exist, but not all of them were so classified. i mean, how long has ’california common’ actually been a recognized style? 200 years ago nobody knew what an imperial or double ipa was, even if they were brewing it. the current disscussions on if super high abv is even still beer. and the fact that many brewers go out of their way to say its a ’xxxxxxx-STYLE ale, not a xxxxxx ale’ makes this point very evident. i think people actually are creating new things that sort of defy traditional categories, just as they have always done. maybe there needs to be an english barleywine and american barleywine style on here. i bet if an english brewer made a a bw and talked about hoe traditional it was, and how different and why than an american, and called it as such, that other makers would follow suit, and eventually there is a new category of bw’s that was really being made all along.
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Glass back then was probably not altogether that different from a bottle beer now. So it sitting in a glass container on a ship is not to different than it sitting in a bottle for an extended period. Especially because as you said back then it was most likely not hermetically sealed. I never said there wasn’t a difference though. I mean clearly there is a huge one. I was just saying your aging it however you do it. And the hop flavor is going to decrease. Still an IPA. No matter what you say I just don’t see that ever changing. I do agree with you on American vs English style barleywine. I think there is a big stylistic difference between them. Barrel aging is not going to change a beer’s basic style. It just isn’t. It may change characteristics of the beer for better or for worse but its not going to change what the beer is. A barrel aged imperial stout is still an imperial stout. So my point in all this is that the OP should do whatever he wants. His question ( a good one) has been more or less answered by you and others. Wood is porous its going to affect the beer more than conditioning in a metal cask.
I just hate to see creativity stifled by nonsense like this:
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not a different style from ipa, a differnt style of ipa. you would probably brew it a lil differently and maybe with differnt amount/ingredients if you were planning on aging it the traditional way as opposed to bottling it for distribution as a hop bomb, wouldn’t you?
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