Old Bones – 225L Barrel 2026

About This Beer

A pale, dry, low-bitterness saison brewed to fill a 225 litre barrel. A collaborative project across two brewers, built around Paul Fantham’s ex-North End barrique, the barrel that previously held North End’s own Saison de Terroir.

The wood still carries North End’s resident house culture, so this is not a neutral vessel but a living one. The whole point is to feed clean saison into it and let what lives in the oak make it sour and funky over a long age.

The wort is a canvas rather than a finished beer. Bitterness is deliberately far below a clean saison, because iso-alpha acids inhibit Lactobacillus and a mixed-fermentation barrel wants the resident culture free to acidify.

This page is the whole barrel. Every batch brewed to fill it, totalled as they go in.

One wort, several strains

Separate 50 litre batches, all to the same recipe, each fermented to terminal on a different strain and only then combined in the wood. The strain differences are the point: each throws its own esters and phenols, and blending before the long age gives more complexity than any single pitch.

• Mangrove Jack’s M29, two batches, Matt’s. French saison, peppery and fruity, very attenuative.
• LalBrew Farmhouse, one batch, Paul’s. Non-diastatic, so it leaves its dextrins behind as long-term food for the barrel’s Brett.
• A wild slurry, one batch, Paul’s. His own wild-captured Brett-forward culture, and the funk driver.

The barrel carries the heritage line on top of that: North End fermented Saison de Terroir with BE-134, so that strain already lives in the oak.

Each contributor ferments to terminal in their own vessel first, so primary lees stay out of the barrel and only clean beer goes into the wood. Same ferment-then-combine discipline as the Lark foeder.

Brewing the fill

Batch 1, 24 July. M29. Run hot into three no-chill cubes, two brim-full at about 23 litres and a third topped up with the remainder and its headspace purged, then dropped to Paul to ferment.

Batch 2, 27 July. Same wort, fermenting here in the 60 litre All Rounder. Took off fast, bubbling hard and eight points down inside the first day.

Both at OG 1.058 off a clean conversion. Both hit the same wall: 50 litres genuinely maxes out the 65 litre BrewZilla. With the full mash and sparge it brims near 57 litres and only about 24 of the 28 litres of sparge will fit. Rather than shave the sparge and lose sugar, the overflow runnings were caught in a bucket, boiled down on the stovetop and added back to the kettle late in the boil. All the extract kept, and the full volume kept.

Paul’s two. The Farmhouse went vigorously enough to push krausen straight out the top on tight headspace. The wild slurry, the batch everyone was most curious about, kicked off fast with the bubbler ticking inside a day. Paul rates it a good culture, thinks it carries a touch of Belgian character, and is happy to commit it to the shared wood.

Into the wood, 15 August

All four batches in, around 208 litres, on top of whatever North End left living in the oak.

Every batch was tasted at terminal before transfer and every one was good, including the wild slurry, which was the only genuine unknown. That gate is why the shared-barrel risk was acceptable: ferment separately, taste, and only clean beer goes near the wood.

Blended in the barrel the mixture tastes right together. Four cultures that each tasted good separately could have made something muddled, and did not.

The top-up, 19 August

Fifth batch, brewed to brim the barrel and bank the overflow as a reserve against the angel’s share. Four batches leave 15 to 20 litres of headspace in a 225 litre barrel, and standing headspace in oak is the thing on this project worth worrying about, since barrels breathe and months of air over beer makes vinegar rather than funk.

The original plan was to hold the top-up until the three-month check and decide about adding bugs at the same time. The two turned out to be separable, so the batch was brewed now and the bug question still gets answered at three months on its own.

Third run of the identical recipe, and the third split boil. It has stopped being an improvisation and become how this recipe is made on this rig.

First of the three to take a pre-boil reading, 1.058 on the refractometer, with post-boil at 1.064. Six points over its two siblings. For a barrel top-up a stronger wort costs nothing; it goes in a touch more alcoholic and still well inside what the culture can live with.

Pitched straight onto batch two’s M29 cake, which had just gone into the barrel four days earlier. No fresh packets: 50 litres of new wort onto roughly three litres of yeast that was actively fermenting the same recipe that week. Strain choice for a top-up is not critical by now, since the established barrel culture will dominate whatever arrives, so the repitch is free as well as fast. Visibly bubbling within an hour or two, effectively no lag at all, where batch two’s fresh two-pack took twelve hours.

One bookkeeping note: the Pill read 1.057 at pitch against the refractometer’s 1.064, which is not a contradiction. It floats in the blend of fresh wort and the residual finished beer carried in with the trub, so it reads low by design.

Now aging

Filled 15 August, top-up fermenting on the cake. Once it reaches terminal and passes the same taste gate every batch before it did, it brims the barrel and the overflow goes to a keg banked against the angel’s share.

From there the resident North End culture works across the blend over 12 to 18 months, sampled periodically, tracked toward a finished acidity somewhere near pH 3.3 to 3.5. It comes out when acid, funk and oak sit right, which is a decision for the palate rather than the calendar.