Adding an oak cube to each 22oz. bomber of my Barley Wine?

[spiderwrangler]

Personally, I think it would work fine for the short term, though it would depart a lot of oak flavor. My concern would be aging the beer, I would think by 2 or 3 years the cube would start breaking down and giving you undesirable off flavors as it breaks down.

Yeah, I know that JZ has talked about aging things on oak to the point that the oak disintegrates... the wood aged Jamil Show perhaps?

[BrewerJ]

Wood is wood, even if the cube breaks down due to long exposure it doesnt transform in to another material. The fibers just become weak and the wood will turn to sawdust. Now if you have bugs it will speed up the break down since the brett is also chewing on the wood sugars.

[spiderwrangler]

Wood is wood, even if the cube breaks down due to long exposure it doesnt transform in to another material. The fibers just become weak and the wood will turn to sawdust. Now if you have bugs it will speed up the break down since the brett is also chewing on the wood sugars.

Actually some of it does. If it just fell apart without release of other flavor compounds, there would be no point in doing oak aging from a flavor standpoint. There are many things that are released, or are produced following degradation of other things present in the oak.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814603005296

In addition, the flavors obtained from oak aging may meld with beer flavors and the overall perception can change with time and aging.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that adding cubes at bottling is a great idea... but it is AN idea, and after all, the only reason we as homebrewers need to try something is 'because we can'.

[BrewerJ]

I understand that there are many compounds in wood, but you are extracting them from day one and so on. What I am saying is that by the time the wood completely breaks down you have already extracted out 99% of those compounds. So in other words dont worry about the wood breaking down. The beer is probably going to be completely consumed before this happens.

I did this same thing seven years ago very early in my brewing. I cant really comment on the results, I remember it being oaky, but I think I had other issues with the beer.

[spiderwrangler]

What I am saying is that by the time the wood completely breaks down you have already extracted out 99% of those compounds. So in other words dont worry about the wood breaking down. The beer is probably going to be completely consumed before this happens.

Agreed.