Racking to barrels and ageing

Not sure if I’m missing this or if there is a better way to do it. Attempting to rack off some beer from FV to barrels for aging, and it is a rather convoluted process… Firstly, I had to create 20 ‘vessels’ of type barrel. Would be nice to have a bulk create option with sequential numbering here as a separate feature request. The primary time-consuming part is transferring beer from FV out to all of these barrels. I’m thinking it might be more logical to have some sort of ‘racking’ option for barrels so that they can be filled in a single process. Just not too sure how that would then work for ageing rather than them going off to the store as a packaged product, which it obviously isn’t at this stage. Likewise, a bulk process for transferring the beer back out of barrels into BBT once done. Interested in thoughts and if anyone else has faced this? Cheers

Thanks Tom. You’re right that this isn’t a perfect process yet.

I wonder if Empty containers into a vessel to allow blending two different packaged products to make a new beer might be a good solution here as the racking process would be much easier?

Do you think that would be a good fit for you? And if not, why (so we can work out how best to solve it)? Thanks.

Possibly Luke. If barrels could be made as a container type then that could work I guess. Would make racking easy, but as per your linked thread, not possible to then empty these containers back into a vessel. I’d also be a little worried about these barrels ending up as ‘stock’ ready for sale rather than a vessel for ageing. It might actually be a whole new area for barrel ageing - I know Beer30 has this as a bolt-on that allows barrel notes, age tracking, merging, back-blending etc. Any plans for similar functionality? Cheers

I must say that right now there isn’t a better solution (that I’m aware of) other than doing what you’re doing now, but I think that the linked feature request would probably be a big improvement for what you’re looking to do.

To prevent the selling of this product, Prevent selling of a product (a racking-only product) is what you’d need. Until then it would have to be named something obvious to prevent someone from doing it, such as “Barrel ageing stout (do not sell)”. It’s not perfect, but should work in practice pretty well and the product can always be renamed back to something more sensible when the blocking feature is done.

Finally, yes there are plans for a barrel ageing section in Breww, but it’s not really made it onto the community yet… well until your thread now :smile:

I think that if we introduced both Empty containers into a vessel to allow blending two different packaged products to make a new beer and Prevent selling of a product (a racking-only product) this would get you most of what you’re asking for, and we could certainly add an extra feature for logging notes/readings and age tracking. If you agree, can you give those other two features a vote? And we can convert this thread into the age tracking and logging feature?

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If we are discussing barrel ageing here, as in long term ageing in oak barrels, then we can share our experiences. Just wanted to check we weren’t talking about firkins (sometimes the terms are used interchangeably)…

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Talking oak barrels, not firkins. Cheers

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Hi guys, this would be great for us too. Aside from the ease of racking into the containers, and then blending back together the next most important aspects of this for us is the tracking of the beers gravity, pH, tasting notes etc during ageing. Having them as a ‘vessel’ type makes the most sense in this case.

It would also be helpful for vessel types, FV, BBT, Barrel etc to have different required fields for filling out. For example FVs need SG and pH whilst BBTs need CO2 and DO, and Barrels would need SG, pH and tasting.

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