Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale

In case anyone was interested,

http://charlottesville.craigslist.org/grd/1623637733.html

Do I see a potential club project here?      C'mon guys, golden opportunity.

I would be willing to go in on group ownership of a barrel. Once or twice a year we could all brew a "big" beer of some agreed upon type, then blend them all together for aging in the barrel.

Are these 55g barrels?

Who has room for one of these?

What are the dimensions?  I might be able to store it.
Edit:
From what I'm seeing online, dimensions for a typical 55g barrel are usually on the order of 2' diameter x 3' tall; sound right?  If that's the case, I could store one.  We have a spare bedroom that doesn't get much use. We basically have the door closed to the room 99% of the time.  The barrel would be subject to whatever temperature fluctuations my house has, but remember 55g of liquid is a significant amount of thermal mass, so I think the temperatures would be reasonably stable.  I'm game for it if the club is willing.
Edit #2:
If the club doesn't want to put any funds towards the purchase of a barrel, then I might go ahead and buy one myself. However, I really don't want to make 55 gallons of wort to fill it, and I think the collaborative nature of having lots of people contribute wort is more interesting.  Anybody interested in going in on this with me?

I have not been a huge fan of sour beers in the past, but they are growing on me.  The barrel would be perfect for sour beer, as it has already been used by Blue Mountain and likely does not have much left in the way of wood character (you could probably ask the brewer about it).  I would definitely be willing to contribute towards the project (assuming several others do as well) - both financially and brewing wort for it.

Here is a cool post from The Mad Fermentationist Blog, where he and several other friends have started a barrel project:

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2008/11/fill-wine-barrel-flanders-red.html

Sour beers are usually made in barrels that were previously used for wine, and the Mad Fermentationist and his friends bought some French oak barrels from a local vineyard for their sour beers. (FYI, I think they paid $125 per barrel from a vineyard in Northern VA.) This is a possibility we could explore too, and if we want to do a sour beer maybe we should just go to some local wineries and see what is available.  IMO, a wine barrel would really be better for a sour ale.  With the bourbon barrels we might be looking at a different sort of brew. I know for a fact that when Blue Mountain got the barrels, they were fresh from the distillery and still had a fair amount of bourbon in them.  They just put their beer right in there with the remaining bourbon.  These are also American oak barrels, so we'd presumably get more "oak-iness" out of them too depending on how much oak flavor was extracted by the bourbon and Blue Mountain's beer.  I would guess that for the initial experiment, we would probably want to brew something that would be complimented by a small amount of bourbon flavor and oak addition, maybe stout, porter, or even Belgian tripel or something.  I'll try not to dump packets of Roeselare when no one is looking.    If you read through the Fermentationist's blog, they added some Roeselare and funked beers to get things started with their sour.  Without that initial inoculation of bugs, beers might not sour real quickly. With a bourbon barrel, we'd probably get minimal funk, at least in the first months. But once we figure out how it's aging, we could definitely make it evolve towards something sour and funky. I could be totally wrong on this of course because Blue Mountain put a beer in the barrels already, so there might be a good chance that acetobacter has taken up residence in the wood.  Buy the barrel and figure out the brew later? At any rate, I'm game for either a bourbon-aged whatever or a sour experiment.  

I have a connection at Jefferson Vineyards. I can inquire with him about the possibility of getting a barrel from there.

I am game for a stout in the bourbon barrel and see where it goes.  The only caviat would be that this should really be a project with at least 5 contributors.  This is not really for the money, but to make all the wort to fill it up.  If we have five people, then everyone would have to brew 10 gallons of wort, which is doable.  If it was only two or three of us, we are looking at 17 to 25 gallons, which becomes harder.

Who else would be interested?

I'd brew up a stout.  That's easy enough.

Sorry, I'm late to the reply on this.  I'm interested in either the sour or straight-up barrel aging. Both are fine with me.

Spidey - Is your room going to be good for a barrel? Is it a hard/tiled floor? What if it leaks or sweats? Is it going to be easy to get the barrel (and refilling worts) in there?

Leaks?    Sweats I could deal with, but leaks would be a problem.  Hmmm.... I didn't think about that.  Getting the barrel in and filling with wort would be fine.  Let me think about this some more... Any ideas for leak prevention or some kind of safeguard against losing 55gal of funk onto my carpet (it's old and ready to be replaced, but still...)?  It's a one floor rancher style house, so I don't have multiple levels to worry about drenching.  Let me mull this over and maybe I can come up with a plan.
On a related note, I brought some beer into work on Friday and I had enough to share with a neighboring lab as well. It turns out that one of the postdocs in that lab has parents that own a local vineyard. She said she could get us a wine barrel no problem.  They are an "anti-Brett" vineyard so the barrels would be reasonably clean to start.  She said last time they had a Brett infection a couple years ago, they threw out all of their barrels.  I almost cried  .  Anyway, I think I have a good source for a wine barrel if we want to do that. Little did I know it would be SO easy to get a wine barrel to do a collaborative sour ale. Personally, I would prefer to do a barrel-aged sour ale rather than the bourbon barrel brew.

That is a great lead, Greg.  I would definitely be supportive of doing a group-based sour beer project.  Let us know if she comes back with a price, etc.

The Mad Fermentationist just posted some information on their one year old sour porter.  Given our discussions about barrels in this thread, I thought it might be fun for others to see.

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2010/03/sour-bourbon-barrel-porter.htm

Latest on the Mad Fermentationisht sour Bourbon barrel wee heavy batch.  They used a wort pump to help pull the beer out of the barrel on bottling day, which is a great idea.  I can only imagine the amount of work to bottle 18 cases of beer by hand.  Very cool.

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2010/03/bourbon-barrel-wee-heavy-bottling.html