I bought these oak spirals for my New England Hard Cider to impart a barrel aged taste to it.
I have used oak chips before and they were a little tough to get out of the carboy after the final racking. These spirals looked interesting to me. They are shaped for the opening of a carboy, they should be easy to remove and have a larger surface area than the chips.
I bought medium toast American oak spirals. The package says that flavor extraction would be complete in 6 weeks.
BYO magazine, in a few articles, has stated that the spirals need 20 weeks of contact time to impart their flavor in beer. I am not sure if it takes that long for hard cider.
My plan was to rack the cider into a clean, sanitized carboy onto a spiral and a half. In three weeks, I would check the flavor. If it wasn’t to my liking, I was going to go another three weeks and so on.
Does anybody have any experience using oak spirals? Should I have used oak cubes instead?
Joe Klinck
I’ve used them before and think they are the best oak product on the market. Sometimes you can get that raw wood flavor from cubes but not with the spirals.
John
Thanks Joe – that’s good to hear. How long did you keep the spirals in contact with your beer*?
*I am guessing it was beer.
John
Update on my cider – the spirals never sank. They floated at the top of the carboy. At the end of three weeks. they had imparted an oak flavor to my liking so I bottled it up.