Success in selling your used bourbon barrels?

[Latkasimka]

Greetings, all. Wondering how folks are doing in terms of finding buyers for their once used bourbon barrels? We've had some limited success with local breweries buying them, but our capacity to use barrels seems to exceed their purchase capacity.

[CountySeat]

Depending on the size of your barrels, try HomeBrew shops, direct to home brewers through your social media, and selling to distributers. Here on the East Coast, Keystone Fermentation in PA buys them regularly from all over the world.

[ebstauffer]

How many do you have, what volume, and where are you located?

[captnKB]

Latkas, we have had some luck selling ours to homebrewers and local breweries. We also reuse some of our bourbon barrels to lay down corn whiskey for a few years down the road

[bluestar]

No problem selling 53g to breweries. We have lots of those around. No problem selling 5g to home brewers. The 10g-15g don't always get picked up.

[mheisz]

What volume of barrels do you have in those sizes? I might be interested in buying them for second use whiskey in Canada. I assume you are in Michigan?

[rtshfd]

I see it from a different perspective. At least with smaller barrels (5-15 G), you could gain yourself some goodwill from the small craft brewing community/homebrewers by providing them used barrels for a cheap/reasonable price. Craft beer drinkers are the same customers that craft distillers would want. They're discerning, respectful of the effort required to make a good product, and they're vocal about what they do and do not like. While we don't have first hand experience with this approach yet (still aging our first batch), I fully intend on using low/reasonably priced used barrels as an olive branch to that community of potential customers. This is an especially good approach if you have a strong social media presence for your craft beer community in your area.

[bluestar]

What volume of barrels do you have in those sizes? I might be interested in buying them for second use whiskey in Canada. I assume you are in Michigan?

Actually, outside of Chicago. Right now we have about 7 barrels, but these have been used twice, either for corn whiskey or gin. We just unloaded 8 bourbon barrels of that size to a brewer.

[bluestar]

I see it from a different perspective. At least with smaller barrels (5-15 G), you could gain yourself some goodwill from the small craft brewing community/homebrewers by providing them used barrels for a cheap/reasonable price. Craft beer drinkers are the same customers that craft distillers would want. They're discerning, respectful of the effort required to make a good product, and they're vocal about what they do and do not like. While we don't have first hand experience with this approach yet (still aging our first batch), I fully intend on using low/reasonably priced used barrels as an olive branch to that community of potential customers. This is an especially good approach if you have a strong social media presence for your craft beer community in your area.

Oh, we agree. But most of the home brewers will snap up the 5g but not the 10g, and it does not seem to be a price sensitivity (even if I offer at the same price). It is just that they are not looking to make more than 5g at a time, which is unfortunate. They are likely to have a better result with the 10g barrel, as well as save money per gallon.