Those Barrels at Fifth Ward

Fifth Ward Brewing Company will celebrate its fourth anniversary on Saturday, November 13 at the brewery's South Main Street taproom. The annual event has grown into a showcase for Fifth Ward's barrel-aging program. This year will bring that into focus with the brewery releasing five barrel-aged beers over the anniversary weekend. They are among the most complex beers ever produced by an Oshkosh brewery.

"We got into barrel aging three years ago," says Zach Clark, who co-owns Fifth Ward with Ian Wenger, where they share the brewing duties. "We're at a point now where it's coming together in a really good way."

Zach Clark of Fifth Ward during a tour at the brewery.

In the world of craft beer, three years is an eternity. But there's no way to rush this sort of thing. The concept sounds simple. A finished beer is racked into a used spirits barrel where it matures and takes on qualities of the barrel and the liquor that had resided there. The actual execution, though, is much more involved.

It all starts with a recipe, or in this case several recipes. "It's never just brewing one batch of beer, putting it into a barrel, then coming back 12 months later and saying here's a barrel-aged beer," Wenger says. "We'll brew three or four completely different recipes, each with a specific quality in mind. One might be dryer and another sweeter. Another might be stronger with more bitterness."

"It's about trying to get the right balance," Clark chimes in. "We're always keeping in mind what we want the finished product to be. In the end, when we get to the blending, we have to have those different flavors to work with to get what we're looking for."

The recipes may be the least of it, though. These are process-driven beers. And it's a process unique to itself. The deviations begin upstream with the wort - the sugary liquid coaxed out of a mash of malted barley and water. For most beer, the wort is boiled for 60 to 90 minutes.

"With these beers, we'll go with a 13 or 14-hour boil," Clark says. "We're trying to thicken the wort, so we boil it down until it’s reduced to the volume we want."

"And you really need that super-long boil to caramelize some of those sugars," Wenger adds. "You need that for color, too. We want that dark-brown, cappuccino-like foam."

Fermenting a wort so thick with malt sugar is no less of a challenge. "With that kind of viscosity you need to pump in a lot of oxygen so the yeast can survive and stay healthy," Clark says. "Otherwise it will just quit on you. We literally have to pump oxygen into the tank during the fermentation to keep it going."

At the end of fermentation, the beers are dark behemoths that can be as strong as 14-percent alcohol by volume. Into the wooden barrels it goes. Over the past year, Clark and Wenger have been working with approximately 40 oak barrels. Their first use was in the production of spirits such as bourbon, rye whiskey, or tequila. About a third of those filled this year at Fifth Ward have been holding bourbon for the past 10 years. Each barrel is topped up with 53 gallons of beer. Then the waiting begins.

The back half of the brewery is the barrel cellar. Stacked four high, the barrels rest in an environment where the Wisconsin weather will add another layer of complexity. "In the summer the barrels up on top will get to be over 85 degrees," Wenger says. "And in winter it will get much colder back there than it does in the front of the building. They go through quite a range of temperatures."

Time is another influence. A full year of aging isn't unusual. "The youngest we've ever pulled was at five months, but that's not ideal," Clark says. "That's not enough time to create the flavors we're looking for."

At the end of September, the barrels employed for this year's batch of beers were brought out of the cellar for a tasting to determine the blends that will create the final beers. It's a heady art, akin to a painter mixing colors to create a specific hue. "We want to hit that right balance using the different qualities coming out of the individual barrels," Clark says.

Wenger pulling samples from the barrels.

"They're all components at that point," Wenger says. "You're looking for the best flavor and you have to build it out of those separate parts."

The extensive process produces a remarkably rich and nuanced beer. Big Willy Style – a blended, barrel-aged barley wine that will be released at the anniversary celebration – has booming notes of bourbon, vanilla, burnt sugar, oak, and raisin. At 16-percent alcohol by volume, it's stronger than most wines and has a depth of flavor that seems inexhaustible.

Until recently, that’s not the sort of beer you'd expect to find in a can. But this year, for the first time, Fifth Ward will release these beers in 16-ounce cans. "It's really what our customers are expecting now," says Wenger.

Both Clark and Wenger are intent on growing their barrel-aging program. "We could probably get this up to 200 barrels," says Clark. "But right now we just don't have the tank capacity to fill that many. We're working on that. This is still just the beginning."